Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I’ve seen so far. It’s an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You’re completely immersed within a virtual sphere with these five stories that are represented as sequences of circles on different lines. As you look at a specific circle, it comes into the full frame and plays a 2D video segments from that victim either sharing their story of sexual assault, the aftermath, their process of healing, or their ideas for how to reform the criminal justice system. The depth of immersion and intimacy that the virtual reality medium enables allows you have much more capacity to provide your full attention and to bear witness to these stories of deep emotional intensity. It’s a radical application of VR that represents a revolutionary approach to healing from trauma.
Testimony premiered at Tribeca in April, and I had a chance to catch up with Zohar Kfir to talk about the challenges and shame that sexual assault survivors experience. We also talk about how the virtual reality medium is unique suited to provide a platform and medium for sexual assault survivors to share their stories of survival. It’s been a profoundly hearing experience for these women to authentically share the emotional intensity of their sexual assault experience, as well of the challenges in dealing with the criminal justice system, and process of healing from trauma.
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Testimony shows that virtual reality is able to carry a depth of emotional intensity of trauma that previous mediums where maybe not as well suited for. The interactive nature of Testimony provides the affordance of being able to look away from a testimony story if becomes too intense, and it’ll stop playing and you’ll retreat back into the sphere of women metaphorically standing in solidarity with each other.
I think that it’s an experience that would be difficult to pull of in previous 2D mediums, and I think that it demonstrates how VR has the unique capacity to discuss the types of trauma that was only previously discussed behind closed doors in the context of a therapy session. The level of emotional intimacy and presence that you can achieve in VR allows for a reciprocal transmission and reception of topics that have been either too taboo or intense for previous communications mediums.
Kfir also has plans to make keep this project going as a living and interactive document. So other sexual assault victims will be able to record their stories of sexual assault and contribute them to the project where they can be witnessed and heard. Providing a platform for having your sexual assault trauma being heard, witnessed, and believed is going to have profound healing implications for the women who participate. It’s a form of distributed and asynchronous Truth and Reconciliation process that will allow victims to release their shame, humiliation, and trauma around being sexually assaulted.
There’s still a long ways to go to reform the criminal justice system around cases of sexual assault, but Project Callisto that was recently announced. It allows victims to report the details of their sexual assault and their perpetrator online. If there are multiple reports against the same person, then it will trigger the criminal justice process and optionally connects the women. This is a huge improvement in the current process, and seems to be a model that has been gaining some traction in other countries.
Testimony is now available as of June 1st, 2017, and it’s one of the most profound and moving experiences that I’ve had in VR so far. Definitely check it out, and share it with your friends and family. You can learn more information from their Testimony website, or follow online with the #ShatterTheSilence hashtag.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So when I was at the Tribeca Film Festival, I got a chance to see all the various VR experiences that were being featured there. And the one that stuck with me the most is called Testimony. What it is, it's an interactive documentary where you are listening to different women give their testimony of being sexually assaulted. And it's an emotionally gut-wrenching and intense experience, but one that was just utterly profound because you're completely immersed in VR. And it feels like it's a medium that you can start to talk about these really intense topics that require your entire full attention to really bear witness to the emotional intensity of these stories. So I had a chance to talk to the creator Zohar Kafir who is an experimental filmmaker and so she's using this medium of virtual reality to really push the edge of what's even possible and I have to say that it's a very very powerful piece and it just released today on the Gear VR so I recommend people go check it out, maybe even listen and watch that first before you finish listening to this podcast just so you can have your own direct experience with it because it is quite a powerful experience. But I wanted to talk to Zohar about her process as well as what the medium of VR is allowing her to do and be able to explore this topic in a completely new way. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR is a gift to you and the rest of the VR community. It's part of my superpower to go to all of these different events, to have all the different experiences and talk to all the different people, to capture the latest and greatest innovations that's happening in the VR community and to share it with you so that you can be inspired to build the future that we all want to have with these new immersive technologies. So you can support me on this journey of capturing and sharing all this knowledge by providing your own gift. You can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Zohar happened on Sunday, April 23rd at the Tribeca Film Festival that was happening in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:41.268] Zohar Kfir: My name is Zohar Kfir. I'm an experimental video maker who ventured into VR a couple of years ago. But it's interesting because my background is in experimental video and interactive installation. And VR seems like a very natural place for me to kind of create installations in a virtual space with interaction. Most of my work deals with interactive storytelling and non-linear narratives. The first piece that I've done last year was an interactive experimental video work that used an archive of found footage from the 50s and 60s that I've been gathering in garage sales. And this was constructed in a choose-your-own-narrative way in Unity. And from there I pitched a project, Testimony, which is now premiering at Rebecca through DevLab, which was a program that was launched by Oculus and Kaleidoscope VR in October this year. Testimony is an interactive VR documentary that highlights testimonies of sexual assault survivors. VR was the only medium that I thought of producing this project because, as I see it, it's the only medium nowadays that really gives content 100% of attention. And especially with such intense topic and emotional intensity. I find that it's listening to people's stories. VR would be like the only medium that people can have the commitment to really listen to those stories and resonate with them rather than scrolling on a 360 video or watching anything online. What I did with this project is interviewed five survivors of sexual assault. Each person interviewed for this project was posed with five similar questions, ranging from what happened into the aftermath of the assault, which would be the PTSD and dealing with the legal system. And the last question was more hypothetical of like, if you had any idea or concept of how to resolve your assault or the case of your assault, what would it be? Because the legal system is evidently not equipped to deal with sexual assault survivors. I mean, it's the second rape syndrome that you have to go on court and you have to defend yourself and detail in front of the public exactly what happened, which is ridiculous. The system needs to change. And these are exactly the stories that do not get to the media, like the personal accounts of the people and what they experienced. Like you hear in the media of like, okay, this person was raped and this was a gang rape and it gets to the media. And the legal system, I mean, just from the past year, Cosby, Brock Turner, like, yeah, it's, I do not even want to expand on it.
[00:05:37.223] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, one of the things that I noticed just over the last couple of years is that there's been this drive towards new ways of women giving testimony of their sexual assaults. Bill Cosby is the one that comes to mind immediately in terms of there had been women who had been coming forward against a very powerful man in the industry, and often these accounts are dismissed or not taken seriously. until there was a critical mass of I don't know how many women ended up coming at least a couple of dozen on the front page of a magazine with their picture and sharing their story of sexual assault. And I think that it's a little bit of looking at an anomaly in the legal system in the sense of the standard of evidence of the objectified evidence of a sexual assault turns out to be very difficult to produce and it ends up being a little bit of a he said she said type of situation. Maybe you could talk a bit about that dynamic of how you see it like right now in terms of the percentages of women coming forward and reporting versus how much is prosecuted versus how much rain is saying is actually happening.
[00:06:42.708] Zohar Kfir: So statistically, only 30% of any sexual assault cases make it to any public proceeding. No one is speaking about it, and in the case of Cosby, well, it's a celebrity, so once there was the hashtag, and once one case got to the media, and more and more and more emerged, women then have the courage to speak up. So it's only when you have this resonance, when you know that someone else experienced the same thing, that you will have the courage to really kind of like, oh, this happens to other people. And I actually, I mean, this week, four participants of the project came to watch it here for the first time. And not to mention that I was like shaking with heart palpitations just from the excitement of them watching it and the fear that of what the emotional intensity of this will do. Each one of them said that the most amazing thing for them to experience from watching the project is the resonance of the cases of what other participants did. The cutting of the hair, the not wanting to go to legal proceeding because what would it do to their life? I mean, one of the women in the project was in a university and she did not report it because she wanted to stay in the university and she wanted to keep her studies. It was more important for her to do that as a first year. So imagine like what happens on campuses when students cannot report this. Yeah, it's overwhelmingly happens everywhere. And what I find it when people do listen to those personal accounts, they then deeply understand what is the aftermath of rape. It's not a one-time thing, it is saying that it takes a decade or more to get over with. It's like hours of therapy and body work and talking and the courage to speak up. Some people will not speak up for a year or more after, and there's the people that will go out and tweet about it immediately. So, I mean, we have the diverse range of people. And for this project that was trying mainly to find the most diverse cases of sexual assault. There is a trans woman who was sexually assaulted when she was a boy, there's a woman who was gang raped, there's the campus rape story, and a rape by someone that you know, or someone who's close to you. And the rapist behind the bushes in an alley is rarely out there. I mean, they do exist, but it's mostly, I mean, most rapes are coming from people that you already know. So it's the family as a childhood or by friends or in a party but it's usually in the circle and this is why it's so difficult to report it and this is why it's difficult for people to come out. So this project is like a hybrid of like activism but it seems like the most timely moment for people to really like listen to those stories and see what it takes to kind of like push the message forward. We do plan in June to launch quite a big web platform to accompany the VR component. As much as I love VR, it's very limited in its dissemination. The project will be released on the Oculus Store in May for free and Oculus was very generous to support this project and I'm very thankful for that. but I still wanted to have the widest dissemination possible so we will launch a web platform that will be web VR based so people could view it with headsets and have this intimacy but also for the people with no headsets they can scroll with the mouse and still reach this content and this platform will also include a call for action for survivors to upload their own stories. So whether they could sign a form and say we would like to be documented and then we will have a crew coming and document the stories or upload their own testimonies, whether it's text, audio or video, to become like a growing archive, like an international global archive that will I hope we'll have thousands of testimonies as it grows. I mean at the moment we are trying to design this database because it needs to be very sustainable for the future so there needs to be a lot of thought of exactly how would it be and how to brand it and launch it in the proper way so it goes to the world.
[00:11:10.117] Kent Bye: Yeah, and something I found particularly powerful about using the medium of VR, because you're essentially breaking up the story into, you know, five or six different sections, and you can kind of go at your different pace or kind of choose who you want to listen to, maybe jump around a little bit. And I found that I wanted to start at the beginning and kind of go through so that I got the full context and not kind of jump in the middle of a story, but really start fresh in the beginning. But that the powerful thing, I think, is that you do have that level of intimacy and being able to completely block out everything else that's happening because you are having these circles with video, but that you start to see the patterns of the stories, the commonalities between them. But also that these women had come to the point where they had realized that by not speaking out that they had in some ways pushed it down to the point where it was maybe giving them physical symptoms or making their lives worse and that by actually speaking out and telling their story it was like giving their testimony was actually re-empowering them in a certain way. And to have a platform like this for other people to also give their testimony If there's no other outlet, it sounds like that's what you're trying to kind of create is that if other people want to submit their testimony and videos to be included within this and that's sort of a living document of that.
[00:12:26.838] Zohar Kfir: I liked that you mentioned the design on the environment, just for people who did not experience it, but it was very challenging to design a 3D space for people to view this content and testimonies in a way that respects the women and men that are giving the testimonies. but also for the viewers because the material is very emotionally intense and I wanted to have an opportunity for people to like easily disengage. So it was obviously that this is not going to be a linear piece and it's not going to be like a 360 when you're locked into a situation and you can't get out. So this is why it was designed with five sets of questions that you can jump between them. It's not necessarily linear so I mean after a while you will realize that it goes from left to right. The first introduction is on the left but having like narrative threads that connect the stories all together. And at the same time, I mean, so it leaves kind of like the space in between for people to make their own connections. What I really like about it, everyone experiences differently because you make your own decisions and your own connections and your own path between the stories. So you can jump from one to another or you can just follow one story. You can decide that it's too much and come back a few days later and watch another. Like it's always there for you. And with the design of the environment, like when you watch one, you have like all the other subjects kind of like hovering around and giving you support or giving each other support. Yeah, I just tried to make it in the most spacious and respectful way or manner for people to view it. And from the feedback that I've been receiving this week, because this is the world premiere, so I've had like... Dozens of people watch it and they do all comment about the nature of the design, which is very respectful and I find it very reassuring that I've made the right choice as a filmmaker and storyteller.
[00:14:21.405] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was one really subtle effect that it took me a while to really notice it, but as the video comes up, the subjects are in black and white, and you do a really long, slow fade into color. And I'm just curious to hear, stylistically, as you're talking about these different topics, that choice to be able to go from black and white into bringing color back in.
[00:14:42.952] Zohar Kfir: Yeah, so this was just like a little perceptual shift that I wanted to play with because, I mean, people's attention spans are very, very short. But if you do listen to an interview, you will gradually notice that it turns from black and white to color and it is like bringing the person alive. and you might not notice at the beginning so stylistically everything is black and white when you start the experience but then as you listen for someone and it might be like after a minute or two but then like suddenly oh this person is getting closer to me and it's colorful and another thing in the design of the environment is like when you gaze at someone they slowly come closer to you until they're like basically face to face and it creates like very high level of intimacy because when someone like is speaking towards you and you really feel uncomfortable turning your head away. So I wanted to play with this notion of the first thing that I thought when designing this project is like when you walk in the street and you look at a homeless person, you would usually turn your head away. But in that way, I wanted people to do movement of turning your head away from something that is emotionally intense. It's something interesting to play with in that manner. and just using the gaze control so when I'm turning something away I also have more space to breathe if something is emotionally intense but I'm also maybe ready to watch another testimony so yeah I mean this physical sensation of like okay this is too intense I can't deal with this but then like what am I going to watch next So it's the color and then there's also an element in the design that some of the interviews have some background effects that highlight their testimony. So whether it's someone is talking about Gulabi gang, so then there will be like kind of like a subtle background of the Gulabi gang appearing in the background or just like visual cues to highlight the testimonies behind. And I do want to mention that Celina Pinel, who was the first person who approached me to be interviewed for the project, and I thank her dearly for doing that. She's the creative director of Kaleidoscope VR, who are the executive producers of the project and became the key collaborators of the project. And I'm very happy to have like more, I mean, having Celina by my side in this project and pushing the message forward.
[00:17:08.471] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that as I was watching it, the parts that I guess make me angry is about the criminal justice system that we have, and the different cases where women may have had DNA evidence even, and yet it's still so difficult to get prosecution. To me, it's like this almost over-reliance on the objective facts and evidence, but yet in these sexual assault cases, that direct evidence is often very scarce or difficult to gather. Maybe you could just talk a bit about what you see as the problem there, in terms of if it's a cultural thing, if it's a legal thing, if it's a standard of evidence, or if it's a matter of having both people give testimony and be able to tell who's telling the truth, you know, because it's essentially one person's word against the other from the legal perspective.
[00:18:00.398] Zohar Kfir: Yeah, I mean, it is a global problem. Each country has its own problem in reporting. Like in India, there is no place for that. In the US, I mean, there might be some states that may be more equipped. I come from Israel, and it's actually in Israel. It's very interesting because there's like a huge movement right now with a rapist database that can cross-reference people. if they are being reported by two women, so then you can immediately go to court or at least empower the two women that reported and tell them there's another person, do you want to take legal action? There are a lot of initiatives that are coming right now, but it's evident that the legal system and the police are not equipped to deal with this. Let's say you were raped, you decide to go to the police, but you run into a police station in the middle of the night with two guys who are like eating donuts and they do not care about that and like having the whole rape kit situation is just not... I mean... Maybe you could elaborate on that for people who don't know what's happening with rape kits. Yeah, so in order to gather the DNA evidence you have to go to a police station and get a swab basically to gather DNA material in order to go to any legal proceeding. The main problem is that in the United States the rape kits are valid only for six months. There's a huge case this year that actually changed the system run by Rise Up. It's an organization that started on social media just to change the legislation so rape kits are valid for more than six months. Because what happens if someone wants to report or is ready to report only a year or two after? Her rape kit can be void. It's, yeah, I mean, it can go on and on and on of like all the problems of the system, but it's, I mean, the base thing is that the system needs to be changed. Like, I mean, there's one of the women in the piece, Tanya Zijel, who's from Montreal, was gang raped in a club in Montreal by five lawyers, bankers that came from New York. She has been stuck for two years. between Montreal and the US. She's not able to sue them because they're in the States and she's been doing all her investigative work because the police in Montreal cannot go beyond the border. It's like the most ridiculous case and this only is like five people in this project that each one of them raises different problems and that's beyond like mentioning like incest when you're within your family and you will get to like late in life and only then have the courage to like shatter your family apart and talk about it. Each case is different and it's only when those stories come out to the public is when people have the courage to speak up and that's the main incentive of this project to just like have those stories up there. and start a global movement for people to upload their own testimonies and like turn it viral and like shatter the silence. And this is the hashtag that we chose for the project is shatter the silence because the silence just needs to be broken and people need to start speaking because this needs to change like it can't happen anymore.
[00:21:22.490] Kent Bye: Yeah, in talking to Skip Rozo from USC, he's been doing a lot of working with virtual reality to treat trauma. And he's specifically working with a lot of veterans and also other populations as well. But one of the things that he told me was that a big part of dealing with trauma is to be able to tell your story and to be really emotionally present to that process of telling the story. And in the course of this piece, there's a lot of people who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and different techniques and modalities to treat their trauma. But I'm just curious to hear from your perspective that process of actually telling the story, being emotionally present to that as a part of their healing process and why it's so important to do that.
[00:22:05.907] Zohar Kfir: Well, speaking up and telling your story is the one thing that really frees people from the shame of the trauma. Whether as an adult or as a child, that's the only thing that really helps people go public with it. Body work, of course, helps somatic experiences. This is what everyone in this project kind of like, it's evident that the somatic experience kind of like treats the body and the trauma and the PTSD beyond words. But it's the speaking up that really helps. One of the participants of the project was the first time for her to speak up and after the interview she wrote me a note saying in this hour I said things that I've never spoken about in therapy and you just released like 10 years of shame from me and I'm so happy this is like going public and it's the first time that I've spoken up. So yeah, I mean it's evident that this is the solution for that and during those stories we'll kind of like make more and more people have the courage to see that it's okay to speak up. You don't have to be ashamed about it and yeah.
[00:23:19.373] Kent Bye: I know Bené Brown has talked about shame in terms of whether it's something that happens to you, whether it's because of who you are as a person, or it's just because of a behavior that happened. And so I'm curious to hear from your perspective, though, this dynamics of shame around this issue, because clearly it's something that when you get sexually assaulted, it's clearly in the place of being a victim. But maybe you could talk about what are the vectors of shame from the culture, and what is really driving that shame?
[00:23:47.612] Zohar Kfir: Well, I mean, when something like this happens to you, you go inwards. There's no other way. You have to contain it within yourself. With PTSD, it's not an on-off switch. Something like this can happen and you can't deal with it, so you just bury it inside. And it can take years, decades to be able to speak about it. You have to first face with yourself and look inside and see what happens to you. Most people won't have the courage to talk about it. The most common theme is because it happens with someone that you know, and then like, what happens if I speak up and blow the story up? And it's like, what does society speak about you? I mean, it's enough that like, women who are raped, this first question that is asked is like, why did you wear? Why did you go with him? And it could be like a friend, but like, why did you go with him to the bar? Why did you invite him? over for a drink. I mean it's the speaking up and going with it publicly that is like coming up with a story and telling it is just very difficult for assault survivors and it's like the first hurdle. I mean it's first you tell a friend and then the friend might empower you like okay maybe you should go to the police or maybe you should talk to your parents and from there it can roll but a lot of people just stop in this first line of like I can't talk about it.
[00:25:13.543] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know in South Africa during the apartheid they had a whole truth and reconciliation commission where there was a lot of different violations of human rights that happened. And they had a process by which you would be able to, as a victim, tell your testimony, share what happened, tell the truth. And you would have your perpetrator on a stand and he or she would be in a situation of basically needing to apologize and say I'm sorry and there would be a panel there basically seeing whether or not there was an authentic apology and if it was authentic they would get less sort of penalty which is sort of a crazy process but in some sense because there's clearly mixed motivations for people to lie or not be authentic but there was a panel of people there just really listening to see that but to me that seems to be a part potentially of the overall process of healing is to tell your testimony, share what happened, tell the truth. I'm not sure if you've heard of any attempts of doing this type of Truth and Reconciliation Commission where you're able to speak directly to your perpetrator and to tell your testimony directly to them or if they're in denial that them denying it is just going to kind of re-trigger your trauma again and just increase the shame.
[00:26:29.195] Zohar Kfir: This is where the whole system is flawed because confronting a perpetrator with a victim is... why? This is where going to court and seeing the person that attacked you is like... and having to recount everything that happened against a group of mostly male judges. Yeah, this is wrong. Judith Herman, who's a professor at Harvard University, and she's the writer of Trauma and Recovery, is an advisor on the project, and she's been very helpful, and she's been doing research about how the legal system is flawed, and it is the one thing that needs, like, I mean, this is the element that needs to be changed, and it's the most difficult thing to change, because the legal system is just, I mean, this is what we're accustomed to, is like going to a judge and going to a court and going to the police, but with assault cases. It just doesn't work like this. And Tanya, one of the participants in the project, actually mentioned in her interview, it needs to be an online form. After an assault, you have to go online and report with the click of a button and write a person's name. And he needs to be confronted by police that needs to come to his house. And this thing needs to happen from the comfort of my own home. If I'm assaulted, I just need to go and click. And someone else needs to be accountable for their crime. I do not need to go to a police. I mean, yeah, I mean, there's the rape kit thing that you need to gather the DNA. That's important. But it needs to be in a more respectful manner.
[00:28:02.948] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the big challenge as well is, you know, how do you deal with false reports? Reports where there was no sexual assault. I think we're actually on the opposite side, where we actually need to listen to the women and trust them. But, you know, I think the argument for something against like that is the fear that you'd have this unconstrained system where you would have kind of like a lot of false reports that may go on your permanent record or something like that.
[00:28:24.642] Zohar Kfir: Let's deal with the false reports when they happen. This should be the least of the concern. I don't see why women, or men for that matter, will report a false report unless they hate crime or anything else that they want to just shame someone. But people should be, first of all, their stories should be believed and then if they're proved otherwise. This is not where we're at. If someone reports a crime, they should be first listened to and then proven otherwise.
[00:28:54.440] Kent Bye: And I think a project like Testimony I think may be a cultural kind of addressing the awareness of how frequently this is happening and just hearing the direct testimony of someone kind of going through the whole story, you empathize more with those dynamics and they're complicated and there's a lot of shame and a lot of other issues that are just, it's not as simple as some people may think intellectually it might be. And I also noticed that Oculus Studios was helping support this, so it sounds like this is also a project that they're behind and gonna help get out there as well, I presume.
[00:29:25.855] Zohar Kfir: Yeah, the project will be... I mean, Oculus was very generous in supporting this project, leading for the Tribeca premiere, which otherwise it wouldn't have happened, and I'm extremely grateful for that, for them helping us support the cause and be under the VR for good program. The project will be released on the Oculus Store next month, because it does need the... widest dissemination. But this is only the first iteration of the project and we will launch the web platform beyond that just to reach the global movement and having people be able to upload their testimonies and share it and make it viral and turn it into like a global movement.
[00:30:05.198] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:30:13.209] Zohar Kfir: Well, I mean, everyone has been talking about VR as an empathy machine or a tool for generating intimacy. It's kind of like old school news at the moment. But, I don't know, being like with a background of like experimental video and more on the art side, it's the only medium nowadays when people have like 100% full attention. you are by yourself. It is rare today to really be by yourself and really be attentive to something and be able to explore. So I think that's like the fullest potential because you're like in a space by yourself and you need to explore and it's up to you to discover things. I mean that's the one thing that really excites me about it. But beyond that, I think we're moving into more AR and more hybrid forms of that, but in a pure essence of storytelling, it's the undivided attention that you are in a headset and you can really be in a story.
[00:31:12.218] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like with your piece, you're using that to perhaps broach and talk about topics that have before been too difficult or too intense to even maybe watch on a 2D screen. And so you think that by using that immersive nature of VR, you're able to maybe address some of these issues in a new way for the first time, it sounds like.
[00:31:29.920] Zohar Kfir: Yeah, I mean this was my main intention in creating this work in VR. It's because it forces people to really listen. It confronts them with an idea and even like here I see like dozens of people pass by and they look at the sign and it's like, oh, sexual assault, like, and walk away. But then there are the people that see the poster and they will, oh, that's testimony, the project about sexual assault, and they will sit and most people sit 20, 30 minutes long. of a sit and they will watch the whole thing. And then they like lift the headsets and you can see that they're really resonated with the testimonies and they're really listened. And it's rare for VR for people to spend that much time and it really like warms my heart to know that they were there.
[00:32:13.162] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:32:14.963] Zohar Kfir: Thank you so much.
[00:32:16.883] Kent Bye: So that was Zohar Kafir. She's an experimental filmmaker who directed the piece called Testimony that was premiering at Tribeca. So I found a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I think this is probably one of the most radical applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. And I think part of the thing that makes it so powerful is just this concept of bearing witness to testimony. If we look at the existing criminal justice system and the requirements for evidence that are put forth on women when they get sexually assaulted, it's just a super high bar. And then there's all the cultural things that happen such that, as Zohar said, it's almost like you're getting violated again in order to talk about your experience to people who don't believe you or are questioning you. or somebody who is publicly denying that it happened. And so it's just a re-triggering and traumatizing experience to even take it to court. So at the core of healing from trauma is to be completely emotionally authentic and present when you're sharing and telling your story and to have it heard, such that you're able to rewrite the narrative of your trauma and your experience so that you're not blaming it on yourself and having this shame and humiliation. something that's really in the core of your embodied experience, but yet, if you try to suppress it, it comes out still in all these different physical symptoms. And, you know, in watching this piece called Testimony, you get to see how that plays out with each of the different victims as they share what happened with them in their sexual assault. the aftermath of trying to come to terms and what to do with that in terms of reporting it and dealing with the criminal justice system, and then the aftermath of trying to deal with the shame and trauma of all of that, but also the reaction to when they try to tell their story, how the culture reacts to them. And then finally, what they think should be changed in this whole system. So there's been a number of different projects that have been released since the time of recording this project. There's Project Callisto, which is this similar type of online database that Zohar was talking about, which is making it possible for women to report their sexual assaults online immediately when it happens. putting all the data in there and having this kind of centralized database such that if there's multiple women who are reporting sexual assaults from the same individual, then there could be some way to either get these different individual women in touch with each other to see if they want to collaborate and to start to bring these charges into a criminal justice system. So because these women haven't traditionally been connected to each other, you essentially have this He said she said situation where it's one person's word against the other when there's not a lot of direct physical evidence of what actually happened and If you get into a situation if it's he said versus she said she said she said and you know in the case of Bill Cosby there's like 20 or 30 women who came forward to give their testimony then it just becomes a situation where it's a lot harder to ignore and So that's the type of system that is trying to be put in place. Again, I think a lot of the people who are thinking about that might get afraid of what does happen if you have someone who is filing false reports, if there's collusion for multiple people coming together and putting multiple false reports. So, I mean, I think that's not where we're at. I think we're at the point where we actually need to just stop and listen to testimony like this project. To sit down and actually bear witness to these stories, then I think they start to carry a different weight, and you start to see the patterns there. And you start to then question, how do you fix this large problem within our criminal justice system? I talk a lot about moving from the information age to the experiential age. I think this is part of it, where there is some level of objective evidence that is still going to be a part of our criminal justice system. But I think we're going to start to be leaning towards being able to gather many different stories and anecdotes and listen to the emotional authenticity of what happened from someone's direct experience. and to not completely dismiss that direct experience as like hearsay or not able to actually be accumulated within the court of law. So it's still like an open question as to how this is all going to play out and how the criminal justice is going to be reformed. I think a big part of it is the culture and awareness of this issue and of these different dynamics. And the other thing about this project is that it's a living document. It's not just a single documentary. right now even the way that it's constructed is that each person's story is broke up into five different parts and There's a couple of different things that happen when you're watching this experience First of all is like when you start to watch one of these stories unfold it comes into your full awareness one single circle with a woman giving her testimony and And you kind of see the women in the background kind of hover around there almost as a symbolic way of standing behind her at, behind her story so that you start to see these women are standing in solidarity for each other, which is a beautiful metaphor. And then you're able to, if any moment, if you feel like the story that you're listening to is too intense, you can look away. And as you look away, then it goes back into the background and you could pick up on somebody else's story, or you could take off the VR headset. When I was watching this at the Tribeca Festival, I watched it in three or four different sittings where I was able to kind of job in and out. And I don't know if I would have been able to just sit down and watch it all the way through. It kind of made it an experience because it was so emotionally intense where you may need to actually take breaks, but it allows you to be able to take breaks and to jump back in when you feel ready to be fully present and bear witness to these stories. The other thing is that this is a living project such that they're going to start to have more and more women record their testimony such that they can start to gather it within this project, which I think is a huge, huge, huge thing to be able to have some sort of platform such that if women haven't been able to find justice in any other way, they can at least tell this story of their direct experience of what happened to them in the aftermath. in the process of doing that and be able to just be completely authentic and emotionally present of doing that, it's going to be a healing process for them to be able to have that platform to be able to both speak that, but also to know that their story is going to be public and that it's going to be heard. I think it's going to have huge implication for both men and women to be able to heal from their sexual traumas. I've mostly been using the pronouns of her and she just because most of the sexual assaults happen against women, but it does happen to men as well. So I just want to put that out there. So this is one of the most powerful applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. I think in my own direct experience, I've seen that VR can allow you to sit with grief or trauma in a way that is not as comfortable in any other medium. And when you're completely immersed, you do actually have more capacity to be able to bear witness to some horrible trauma that they went through. And it does build this sense of empathy for them in a way that you're actually receiving their story, which is healing for them to be heard. But it's also healing for you to just have that level of empathy and awareness when issues of assault or harassment or abuse come up. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. 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