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When I went to my first Telluride Film Festival, I became a woman possessed, rushing from film to film, waiting in line for hours on a slim chance of getting into a hot-ticket tribute, eating popcorn for dinner and quaffing coffee at midnight to stay awake for the collected works of an obscure music-video director. My festival experience culminated in a 5-movie day, at the end of which I felt as though I had followed an EXIT sign out of my own history into someone else's dreams.

Film shows us the world literally through another's lens, an experience that can be thrilling, inspiring, or as dreary and lifeless as a sequel to a sequel to a bad-to-begin-with Hollywood hack-fest. If, as Don Cheadle suggests, film can inspire us to change the world, it doesn't always change us for the best. On the subject of rape, film has often been an enemy rather than a friend of rape's victims. Seen too often, and too often through the dreamy, eroticized perspective of the rapist, Hollywood makes rape seem like a glamorous fantasy.

Raw, painful to watch, and necessary, André Brooks's film offers information and stories that don't get told because they are hard to confront. His film wakes us from Hollywood's seductive, destructive dream.

--Julia