Filmmaker shares her troubling story of abuse

At the kick-off event for SAFE Week, the UNC community gathered Monday in Lindou Auditorium in Michener Library to watch filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman’s personal film about a difficult subject.

“The Line” is a personal documentary about a young woman’s experiences with rape in a foreign country and how she copes with what happened. The film asks the question, “Where is the line of consent?”

Schwartzman’s 24-minute documentary tells the story of a young woman who was raped by her work colleague after a night out. As the filmmaker unravels her experience, she makes the decision to confront her attacker. The documentary was created a few years after the incident occurred. After the documentary ended, a question-and-answer session followed.

“My main question to my perpetrator was what happened that night?” Schwartzman said. “And my side of the story was that I was raped, and I wanted to know how he recalled it.”
She described the scene where she met her perpetrator years later following the rape incident in order to obtain some form of closure.

“I blocked his face out and placed a black bar in the documentary; I am not trying to expose him,” she said. “It was more like a conversation, and I need to protect his privacy, especially since he and I were the only witnesses that night.”

After the incident, which happened in Jerusalem where Schwartzman worked at the time, she returned to New York City. The filmmaker said she was clear about what happened, but it was her friends who minimized the incident and told her it wasn’t “a big deal” because it wasn’t a stranger on a dark street. To clear up her confusion, she decided to create a documentary of her experiences in coping with and getting out of her situation.

“What happened to me would be legally defined as rape, but I would not find that closure within the criminal justice system,” Schwartzman said. “When I met up with my perpetrator and said to him, ‘You raped me,’ he wouldn’t acknowledge it.”

By bringing the film into the larger world and creating conversation, Schwartzman sheds light on these kinds of experiences and how men and women are both responsible to prevent them.

Schwartzman’s advice to victims of similar crimes is to contact an advocate instead of only talking to friends for advice, simply because friends don’t often know what to do and may negate your experiences.

“It was a very powerful film, and it brought up lots of interesting questions that most people won’t discuss,” said Cassie Nieder, a senior sociology major. “It definitely made me think what my line is. It’s way more common in campus communities.”

Lauren Shelton, a sophomore human services major, said the documentary was very interesting and very educational on what consent is.

“I wondered if she ever got closure from confronting her perpetrator,” Shelton said. “If I was in her shoes, I probably wouldn’t have confronted the perpetrator but contact an advocate right away.”

Audience members were asked to think about their line, and document them in pictures at www.whereisyourline.org.