Review of It Happened Here (2014) by Preston L — 07 Nov 2015

It Happened Here is a documentary about the rape culture of college campuses. It features the stories of a number of young women who were sexually assaulted during their college careers, how it affected their lives at the time and where they have come from it. It also shows how colleges are affected by the accusations that their campuses do not feel safe and what campuses are doing to prevent future assaults from happening.

Things I Like:

The Tone. This movie hits you. It opens this subject up and hits you with how much of a problem rape on college campuses is. The documentary knows how to just dig into you and make you feel like you were personally affected by these tragedies even though you weren't and you want to do something about it because it is a large problem for many women on college campuses.

The Content. The documentary does a nice job of telling you what happened to these women and then moves to show how it has changed them and how it has altered their lives and how they are overcoming this traumatic moment in their lives. It does a nice job of balancing and sort of mirroring the experience by not keeping you bogged down in the incidents themselves but shows what happens afterward and why that is sometimes the much harder part.

Things I Didn't Like:

The Similar Stories. The film gets monotonous because the stories are too similar in a lot of ways. I wanted to see a wider impact and I understand the subjects are chosen to convey a specific message but it would have been interesting to see a much more diverse set of stories because it seemed, from a lot of the stories they told us, that this affects a series of college students and they take a path that is almost prewritten afterward and don't move on and reclaim other parts of their lives.

Overall:

Overall the documentary is really powerful. It tells stories of the victims in a way that really hits you and makes you want to stop college campus rape before it starts. But I just wanted more diversity in the victims, and maybe their weren't that many, or maybe their stories weren't all that interesting, or maybe they didn't want to talk. But the documentary tells, what seems like at times, to be 5 versions of the same story. So it succeeds on conveying it's content and message but could have had more to keep our attention.