Sexual Violence In Myanmar's Rohingya Crisis

Tufts Amnesty International Presents: Film Screening of “Mother, Daughter, Sister” and Conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Esther Htusan.

Mother, Daughter, Sister is a half-hour documentary about ethnic women affected by rape as a weapon of war in Myanmar. Told through the eyes of four Rohingya and Kachin survivors, the film shows the brutality of the Myanmar military, the resiliency of survivors and their quest for justice and accountability.

The event will begin with word or introduction from Jeanne Hallacy, who directed "Mother, Daughter, Sister". She has lived in Thailand for decades, producing stories about human rights and social justice issues in Southeast Asia with expertise in Burma. Hallacy has worked as an advocate of Press Freedom and served as the Director of Programs at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand from 1997-2010. Hallacy is the director of the award-winning InSIGHT OUT! Photo Storytelling project that trains children in conflict areas to create media. http://www.insightoutproject.org/ Her documentary films are used as agents for change.

Jeanne will be joined with Gregg Butensky (Tufts BSEE 1984), who founded co-founded Kirana Productions, a non-profit that develops human rights films for international advocacy and social change, along with Jeanne. In addition to Mother, Daughter, Sister, Gregg has also worked with Jeanne on Sittwe (2017), about two teenagers affected by the violence in Burma’s Rakhine state, a Rohingya girl and Buddhist boy, This Kind of Love (2015), profiling Burma’s first LGBTQ rights activist Aung Myo Min, and Into The Current: Burma's Political Prisoners (2012). Gregg also misses the glory days of WMFO!

There will be a discussion following the screening with Esther Htusan. Esther started her journalism career working as a freelance producer, fixer and translator for international news agencies covering the parliamentary by-elections. After joining the Associated Press in 2013, she has been relentlessly pursuing stories about human rights abuses in Myanmar following a half-century of dictatorship. She has reported on the plight of the Rohingyas, who are Muslims living in the Rakhine state in the country’s western shore but are denied Myanmar citizenship.

Htusan was a member of the Associated Press investigation team that looked into forced labor in Southeast Asia’s fishing industry. Her compassion and resourcefulness in reporting led to some of the most powerful images the world has seen about modern day slavery, including men in a cage on a remote Indonesian island. Htusan helped interviewed forced laborers who spoke of abuses at the hands of their captains and begged the journalists to tell their families back home that they were still alive. Her team’s work won 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

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Event is co-sponsored by the Asean Society