“A Way to Justice”. Stories from men and women around the world organising for women’s rights and gender transformation.

A 52-minute Documentary Directed by William Nessen and produced for Sonke Gender Justice Network

Across the world, in places expected and unexpected, men are working to challenge patriarchy, end men’s violence against women and promote gender equality. Whether In Nicaragua, Brazil, Rwanda, Cambodia, Mongolia, Sierra Leone or Mexico, men are working with women to develop and implement policies and programmes that mobilize men and boys to take action to create societies free of rigid definitions of manhood and womanhood in which women and men can enjoy healthy, happy relationships that contribute to just and democratic societies.

In its role as Global Co-Chair of the MenEngage Alliance, Sonke has the unique privilege to learn from and contribute to these global efforts—whether through peer to peer exchanges with the organisations making up MenEngage’s 35 country networks, or by partnering with UN agencies at headquarter and country levels.

To capture the energy and momentum of this global movement, Sonke commissioned award winning documentary film maker William Nessen to film the MenEngage Africa symposium convened by Sonke in October 2009. It can be seen in full at http://vimeo.com/26553725.  

“A Way to Justice” tells the story of this emerging global movement through the eyes of leaders in the field who came together at the MenEngage Africa symposium. Weaving together four principal autobiographical stories of individual and societal crisis, the film follows each narrator through terrible times to each one's eventual triumph, as they confront and transcend the forces that have wreaked havoc with their and their nation's life. 

“A Way to Justice” transports the viewer to some of the world's most harrowing and forgotten places - from sprawling West African refugee camps and Central African borders in the bush to rural and urban Southern Africa.

The first part of the film and of each personal story is painful: David Tamba, a Sierra Leonean running from civil war whose wife is gang-raped by rebels, spends 11 years in refugee camps.  Pascal Akimana, then an 11-year old Burundian child fleeing both his father's and his country's violence, finds even more violence across the border in the DRC – soldiers rape his 10-year old sister in front of him.  Jennifer Gatsi, a Botswanan woman growing up with a father who beats her mother nightly, is forced to wed a violent husband who infects her and two small children with HIV. And Trevor Davies, a white Zimbabwean photojournalist whose career focus blinds him to the dire struggle of a son who eventually dies of AIDS.

But the next part of each story — and the bulk, heart and purpose of this film — is cathartic and inspiring, even heroic.  Understanding that people around them are facing the same or even heavier burdens, each of the four becomes a champion activist engaging men and boys for social change.

Tamba overcomes his own shame of powerlessness to form a rapidly expanding organization of men confronting violence and challenging unfair gender roles in the huge refugee camps in both Guinea and Sierra Leone. Akimana, who had sworn to join the rebel movement and return to kill his violent father, realizes that non-violence and reconciliation are his and his country's only righteous path. Davies finds a solution to his own guilt and pain, and perhaps a key in talking with men resistant to women's rights: he starts an organization dedicated to promoting a new, more responsible, caring form of fatherhood, which will benefit women, children and men. Gatsi, who has struggled through an intimate hell created by the men in her life, dedicates herself to helping women with HIV, increasingly with a focus on changing young men.

As other of our narrators working on gender transformation—Gary Barker, Tyler Crone, Lydia Mungherera, Lynn Ngugi, Dawn Cavenaugh, Jonah Gokovu--punctuate with concluding reflections on their own life and the changing world, it is the eloquent former refugee David Tamba who sweeps the viewer along toward the film’s powerful emotive end.

"When you fall short of certain things, you should accept that, yes, you are at fault and that you made some mistakes,” he says in a deceptively ordinary bit of wisdom, now packed with enormous power given what he and others have narrated. “But you want to make a change for the better. Then from there you can proceed. ...”