LISA F. JACKSON, Emmy Award-winning producer/writer/director of documentary films. Her latest, "Sex Crimes Unit," which goes inside the Manhattan district attorney's office, will air next summer on HBO.
Idea: Make my movie obsolete
Ms. Jackson writes: In 2008 I made a documentary film. The world would be a better place if in 2011 that film became totally irrelevant. The film is called "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," and it describes in harrowing detail the plight of women and girls in that conflict-ravaged country. Eastern Congo is a living hell where it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier. It is a place where a battle for resources has killed more than 5.4 million people and where rape and sexual violence are the weapons of choice. Millions of people have seen my film, and as a result many thousands more have picketed, protested, and prayed that our leaders would make an effort toward ending that war, ending the deliberate destruction of women's bodies and ending the impunity that allows rapists to ravage at will.
In 2011, if resolving the conflict in the Congo is made a foreign-policy priority, if "The Greatest Silence" is reclassified as "history" instead of "current events" and the horrors it contains are seen as a record of what once had been instead of what is still happening, the world would be a far, far better place.
