An Army of Women Tells the Story of a Criminal Justice Crusade in Austin
Julie Lunde Lillesæter shines a light on the women who made Austin a better place for rape survivors
By Sarah Marloff, Fri., March 8, 2024
It still shocks filmmaker Julie Lunde Lillesæter when Austinites don’t know about the class action lawsuit filed, in total, by 15 rape survivors against the city, county, and local criminal justice system.
“One of the things that struck me about this lawsuit is that, even today, there are people I know, who I consider quite up to date on things, that still haven’t heard about the lawsuit, which happened here in Austin, and was quite historic,” Lillesæter tells me over Zoom. The Scandinavian director is hoping to change that when her documentary An Army of Women makes its world premiere in Austin.
After years of dismissals, appeals, a district attorney election, and the retirement of an Austin police chief, the cases were settled – in June 2021 by the county and January 2022 by the city. With those settlements came the promise of concrete change in how Austin and Travis County treat survivors and pursue sexual assault cases.
Over the course of its 84 minutes – distilled from hundreds of hours filming over four years – An Army of Women concisely tells the complicated story of how 15 women set out to change Austin and Travis County’s criminal justice system. Led by Mary Reyes, Julie Ann Nitsch, and Marina Garrett, with the help of their lawyers Jennifer Ecklund and Elizabeth Myers, the original 2018 lawsuit accused Austin, Travis County, APD, and the Travis County’s District Attorney’s Office of continuously failing women survivors of rape leading to gender-based inequitable treatment and the violation of survivors’ Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Lillesæter was living in Austin when she learned about the lawsuit in 2019. “I was really shocked,” she says. “I was naively thinking that when assaults happen, there’s a system in place to handle it properly, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. When I learned about the lawsuit, I [realized] the system is really failing – spectacularly. And there doesn’t seem like anyone in charge who wants to fix it.” She immediately contacted the lawyers and soon began meeting with the plaintiffs.
Though roughly half a dozen of the suit’s survivors are featured in the 84-minute documentary, two stand out: Garrett, who was raped by a stranger in a Downtown parking garage, and Hanna Senko, who was drugged and date-raped by a man she knew. That wasn’t the only contrast between them. At the time Lillesæter started filming, Senko was not yet a named plaintiff and hadn’t spoken publicly about her experience with the criminal justice system; Garrett began advocating for change in 2016 when the city’s rape kit backlog made headlines.
Lillesæter, noting the pair’s various differences, says it “felt important to show that it doesn’t really matter what kind of assault it is.” The two subjects were obvious centerpoints. “It was clear from the beginning that both Marina and Hanna were really active and eager to do things out in the world,” says Lillesæter, before adding, “being a part of a documentary like this is really challenging ... I didn’t want to push anyone to do that if they didn’t really want to.”
After years filming the plaintiffs and the lawsuits’ many turns, shaping the story into a concise narrative was a challenge, Lillesæter says. Noting that An Army of Women could have been 10 different films (“there’s so much more that could have been said”), she decided to shape the story around the lawsuit, routinely flashing the number of days since the suit was filed throughout the film – 365, 700, 1,000 – driving home the span of time the survivors were kept in limbo. “When you make a film like this, you have to make choices: What resonates emotionally, as a viewer?”
But one thing remained certain from the start: An Army of Women had to make sense to European audiences. That certainty has paid off: The documentary has already sold to Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries, according to Lillesæter.
When asked why she thinks it’s attracting European interest, Lillesæter offers, “I think it’s because it’s really hopeful, as serious as it is. It’s a sort of a story that shows you can change systems,” she pauses. “Even if it’s an Austin story, it feels very relevant. No matter where you are.”
An Army of Women
Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere
Friday 8, 2pm, Zach Theatre
Tuesday 12, 2:45pm, Rollins Theatre at the Long Center
Friday 15, 6pm, AFS Cinema
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