The Brutal Truth

It was not her aim to put herself, her story into the film. But once she told her story, women opened up. "It became clear the connection I had with the women resulted in incredibly honest interviews," Jackson said. "It also made the film less voyeuristic. It helped the audience understand."

To gather the women's stories, Jackson, 57, visited hospitals, sat in mud-floored huts and churches, putting names and faces and grief on camera until the viewer is moved to feel, turn away, do something. People are always asking Jackson, "But what can I do?"

"People have to find their own thing to do," she says. "There is so much you can do. I made a film."

Jackson, who calls herself a "Foreign Service brat," went to Holton-Arms, a private girls' school in Bethesda. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, then studied film at MIT with the documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock.

After college, she returned to the District to work at WETA television. For about two years, she worked as a film editor with legendary documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. She eventually started her own production company and, over the next 30 years, made documentaries in Siberia and Guatemala. She won three Emmy Awards.

For her next film, she wanted to document the fate of women and girls in conflicts around the world. In 2006, she went to South Kivu, a province in the eastern Congo.

"I ended up going to the worst place first," Jackson said in the interview. "I had good friends working for the U.N. peacekeepers there. I cashed in frequent flier miles and went where the conflict was raging. After two days, I realized this was not a segment in a larger film. This was the story nobody was telling."

She "found many dozens of raped women, women of all ages, too many women, who at times would line up for hours, waiting until after the light disappeared and my camera could no longer record an image, waiting to talk to me, waiting to tell their stories to someone who would listen to them without judgment, hoping that I would relay their stories to a world that seemed indifferent to their horrific plight."

One woman told of being kidnapped and held with other women in the forest as sex slaves. "We were raped by 20 men at the same time. Our bodies are suffering. They have taken their guns and put them inside us. They kill our children and then they tell us to eat those children. If a woman is pregnant, they make your children stand on your belly so that you will abort. Then they take the blood from your womb and put it in a bowl and tell you to drink it."

To find the rapists, she asked her guide to find men willing to be interviewed. "In work with the U.N., he knew a lot of Congolese army officers. He went to a commanding officer and said there is an American journalist who wants to interview your men about raping women. He said okay and put the word out among the soldiers."

She ended up deep in the forest, led by a dozen men.

"For a moment, going into the bush, I was completely panic-stricken," Jackson said in the interview. "Then I realized they wanted their moment on videotape. If anything happened to me and my camera, they wouldn't have that. My camera was as good as a gun. They wanted to be memorialized, bragging about what they did to women."