In the unforgettable Seeds of Hope, women in the Democratic Republic of Congo describe attacks of unimaginable brutality — it’s a story of the triumph of human nature over terrible abuse, the film’s maker Fiona Lloyd-Davies tells Alison Roberts.
The women, who describe attacks of unimaginable brutality — gang rapes, killings, sex slavery, atrocities involving the rape and murder of children — are rebuilding their lives slowly at a time of relative peace in the region. Masika is renting a small plot of land and the women, many of whom have been rejected by their husbands as a result of rape, seem to be regaining a sense of identity and potential as they work the richly fertile central African soil.
And then, in November 2012, the soldiers come back.
At this point watching the film — which is shown tonight in a free screening at the ExCeL Centre as part of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict — becomes almost unbearable.
Stella McCartney
As Masika says, where there’s fighting, there’s rape,” says Lloyd-Davies, 49, who first documented victims of sexual violence in the DRC in a series of photographs in 2001. Ten years later, the culture of rape was so entrenched, its use as a weapon of war so prevalent, particularly in the east of the country, that senior UN official Margot Wallstrom called the DRC “the rape capital of the world”.
