THE HUNTING GROUND: Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering tackle rape again, this time via higher learning

Just as this twosome did three years back in The Invisible War, their exploration of rape in the U.S. military, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering have now done for rape on the college and university campus, and what they tell us in their new film is -- if this is possible (and, yes, it is) -- even more appalling and disgusting than what we learned in the earlier documentary. It is bad enough that so many men, along with their enabling male pals, find it just-business-as-usual to rape women. But in THE HUNTING GROUND, we learn what our higher education system doesn't do about all this, especially when sports come into the picture. All this proves quite enough to make us wonder if maybe the treatment of women by Muslim fundamentalists and Sharia Law aren't so bad, after all.

The shoddy, sleazy behavior of so many of our educational institutions in blaming the victims and/or sweeping it all under the carpet is simply astounding, and the filmmakers back up the statistics they shows us by citing the various studies from which they came. As with the earlier doc about military rape, Dick and Ziering (above, left and right, respectively) point out that young men are also affected by rape on campus but that the primary victims are women.

The movie begins with those video-ed marketing and home movie moments in which schools promise the world to their new students, and the kids get ready for what they imagine will be their most wonderful experience. Then, as we hear the stories and as the filmmakers speak with one victim after another (most still alive, others not), and learn the reactions -- short- and long-term (note how many of the young women seem to have put on extra weight, post-attack -- the picture of male entitlement, patriarchy, power, and money buying silence comes slowly and horribly to the fore. Women remain, as so often, second-class citizens.

Some of the more moving moments come as the victims explain why their most difficult time entailed telling their parents about what happened. Fraternities of course come under the microscope, with ugly results. "Fraternities are essentially 'unregulated bars'," notes one fellow (shown below), and we hear a favorite frat-boy chant: "No means yes, and yes means anal." Wow. Can't wait till my grand-daughter gets into one of these bastions of higher learning.

Kirby and Ziering talk with a fellow now retired from the Notre Dame Campus Police, and what he has to tell us is pretty awful in terms of how the campus police are hog-tied by the university. Even worse -- but perhaps the crowning achievement of the documentary -- concerns the football star Jameis Winston (below, left), Florida State University, the Tallahassee Police Department and the untold horror and hypocrisy that can happen when your rapist is a guy who can help win football games. If this section of the film doesn't raise your blood pressure to new heights, I'll be surprised.

A lot of schools come in for a licking but the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill probably takes the cake. So much is so wrong with how higher education handles rape that you can't help but understand why the filmmakers maybe spend a bit too much time on their happier, rah-rah finish. Some of their organization, too, seems a little haphazard. But Dick and Ziering turn over so much ground so thoroughly that you'll forgive them the occasional fumble.

The Hunting Ground, from Radius/TWC and running a relatively swift 104 minutes, opens this Friday, February 27, in Los Angeles at The Landmark and in New York City at the Angelika Film Center, with other cities soon to join the ranks. To see all currently scheduled playdates, click here.   

Kirby Dick's doc THE INVISIBLE WAR--about rape in and by our military--could turn you into an angry, determined activist

You don't have to be a woman, a feminist or anti-military to have the content of Kirby Dick's new documentary, THE INVISIBLE WAR, knock you for a loop. I suspect the only requirements might be that you are neither a narcissist nor a rapist. By content, I do not mean the rapes themselves. We get no re-enactments here, and as horrible an experience as a rape must be (in one case, the physical abuse preceding it has left the woman with permanent face, neck and head injuries), the event itself pales in comparison with the disgusting, immoral and unjust treatment these women -- and, yes, raped men -- have received time and again at the hands of the U.S. Military.

It is this "abuse" from the military that makes Mr. Dick's film such a stunner (the director is shown at right), and one that is bound to raise the ire of -- not just viewers but the military itself. At this point in time there have been plenty of other documen-taries about how our military has betrayed American servicemen (and women) in every manner -- from not supplying then with proper protection during our most recent (and either unnecessary or poorly handled) misad-ventures in the middle east to not providing returning vets with the help and care they need. Now comes this latest and surprisingly quiet but nonetheless sca-thing indictment that should bring to mind that ever-green truism that military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Dick has organized his film so that, as we get the individual stories of these women (and one man) and their rapes, we also learn a short history of women in the military, the statistics on rape, and in particular some interesting material on rapists themselves, their modus operandi -- and why the military is such a target-rich environment for sexual predators.

As Dick takes us back to the Tailhook and other military scandals, it is difficult not to see how similar all this is to sex abuse scandals that have plagued for decades (and continue to pop up with alarming regularity) The Catholic Church, as well as educational institutions (the Sandusky case now playing out on national TV). Power congregates, then corrupts, and then abuses. And it never takes well to underlings pointing this out.

As these women's and one man's (shown at right) stories are told, you'll be struck again and again with how difficult it must have been to relive all this -- and then to lay it out in public. "When the tests and report came back, I had trichinosis and gonorrhea and I was pregnant," one woman tells us. "But as bad as it was being raped, as bad or worse was the reaction of the military to the report."  As case after case is turned a blind eye by the military, your blood pressure will increase accordingly. And one of the insurmountable problems these women encounter is that, in many cases, the rapist is a friend of the officer to whom they must report -- or worse, that officer himself.

As we're told by the women and the lawyers who are working for them, when rape happens in the non-military world, one goes to the police -- who usually have no vested interest in the case -- and it is handled. In the military, there is always vested interested, and it is in the military's best interests that the case simply go away. This is why there is now a movement afoot to change the rules so that the military is not allowed to try these cases.

In one of the saddest scenes in the film, in a restaurant, one of the rape victims encounters a female restaurant worker about to join the military. She cautions her against it, but is met with the expected resistance. Our ex-soldier can't possibly, in the few seconds of time remaining, tell the girl the whole truth of why she is so concerned, and the scene takes on a terrible poignancy and sadness. After you've seen this film, you'll want to caution every young man and woman you know to think again before committing to American military service -- in which recruits both male and female remain, as ever, nothing more than cannon fodder in battles abroad, and increasingly, at home.

After playing the current Human Rights Watch Film Festival, The Invisible War will open this Friday, June 22, in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and DC, and then spread elsewhere across the country in the weeks to come. To see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, click here.