{"id":427303,"date":"2026-01-23T04:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T04:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/427303\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T04:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T04:22:12","slug":"silenced-director-talks-sundance-doc-defemation-and-amber-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/427303\/","title":{"rendered":"Silenced Director Talks Sundance Doc, Defemation and Amber Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn some ways, Silenced, a documentary premiering at this year\u2019s Sundance<\/a> Film Festival, acts as a post-script to the MeToo movement, a time when individuals felt empowered to speak out against perpetrators of gender-based violence.<\/p>\n

\n\tFocusing on the work of international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, and using Robinson\u2019s 2023 book Silenced Women as a framework, the documentary focuses on how defamation laws are weaponized against women who spoke about their experiences with sexual assault, harassment and gender-based violence. The documentary shows the legal mechanisms that have since been employed to punish those women, whether high profile or not, and ensure that they are unable to talk about their own experiences in public.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fatigue around MeToo. For some people, there\u2019s a sense of \u2018That\u2019s done. We dealt with that back in 2017.\u2019 We wanted to try and connect the dots in a way that acknowledges that it\u2019s a continuum,\u201d says Silenced director Selina Miles.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, the filmmakers didn\u2019t want to only tie their documentary to the events of the MeToo, with Miles noting that the fight for survivors existed long before 2017. Says Miles: \u201cAnybody who works in this space will tell you that women\u2019s efforts to speak about their experiences and to address this horribly pervasive issue, there\u2019s not going to be a singular event that\u2019s going to solve a problem. It\u2019s this constant fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Silenced is about that fight, using headline-grabbing cases from around the world as case studies.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the subjects speaking in the documentary is actress Amber Heard<\/a>, who accused Johnny Depp of physical violence during their marriage and has since endured a legal firestorm that has spanned two countries. Robinson represented Amber Heard during the U.K. trial where Depp sued The Sun for calling him a \u201cwife beater.\u201d Depp ultimately lost that libel case, with the judge ruling that the article was \u201csubstantially true.\u201d In the U.S., Depp brought a defamation case <\/a>directly against Heard over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in 2018 and surviving domestic violence (Depp was not mentioned by name). That jury ruled in favor of Depp.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth cases were fodder for a media firestorm, begetting nightly news specials and full-length documentaries. In Silenced, Heard says in a talking head style interview that she was willing to speak about her experiences dealing with defamation suits to shine a light on the legal retaliation that can be deployed against those who speak about gender-based violence and sexual abuse. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAmber lent her voice to this film at great personal risk, and with everything that she\u2019s been through, it\u2019s extraordinary that she\u2019s having the courage to continue to speak about her experience,\u201d said Miles, adding, \u201cShe was emphatic to us from the beginning that this film isn\u2019t about her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA number of other cases are featured in the doc, including that of Brittany Higgins, a onetime junior staffer who came out in the press that she was raped by a fellow political staffer in Australia\u2019s Parliament House. Also explored is the case of Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, who was sued by director Ciro Guerra for defamation after reporting and publishing a story where eight women accused the filmmaker of sexual assault and abuse.<\/p>\n

\n\tMiles notes that the filmmakers were not interested in relitigating the cases. Instead, the film\u2019s roughly 90-minute runtime focused on the issue of using defamation cases as a legal tactic to silence women. \u201cI really wanted to dedicate every minute of that to the first-hand, personal experience with these women. Not to speculation, not to opinion,\u201d says the filmmaker. In Silenced, they wanted to offer a different understanding of well-known disputes: \u201cHow do we offer something to the audience that is different to what they might have seen before about these cases?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMiles points out that the legal situations brought up in Silenced extend well beyond what she calls \u201cwomen\u2019s issues.\u201d She says, \u201cThese kinds of lawsuits are coming for everybody. This is a major threat to free speech and freedom of the press.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRobinson has also been the longtime legal representative for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. She will be on the ground at the festival where Silenced is premiering in the World Cinema Documentary competition and is seeking distribution.<\/p>\n

\n\tMiles hopes that her film helps audiences to think about the personal bias and perception they may have towards women who speak out about gender based violence. Says the filmmaker: \u201cThe purpose of this film is to create conversation. All we really want to say with this film is that silence is not the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In some ways, Silenced, a documentary premiering at this year\u2019s Sundance Film Festival, acts as a post-script to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[31583,178371,49,48,75,337,79523,109539],"class_list":{"0":"post-427303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-amber-heard","9":"tag-amber-heard-vs-johnny-depp","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-sundance","15":"tag-sundance-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}