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Little Stones advocates for equal gender rights

Little Stones advocates for equal gender rights  March 28, 2018

 Sade Palmer

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The Ware center hosted a showing of Little Stones, a documentary displaying advocacy for Women's Rights. Photo Courtesy Alexander Bershtein.

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Alexander Bershtein Sta

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Millersville University and the Lancaster community was granted a view to the multiawarded documentary on advocacy for Women’s Equal rights, Little Stones, on February 28 th before it was presented at the United Nations on the morning of International Women’s Day, March 8 th . The lm won Best Documentary at the 2017 Vail Film Festival, Best

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Foreign Documentary at the 2017 Female Eye Film Festival, Humanitarian Award at the 2017 Docutah Film Festival, and Award of Excellence at the 2017 Impact Doc Awards, as well as

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others. The lm was directed by the Emmy award winning Sophia Kruz and tells the story of four

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women;

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Sohini Chakraborty, Panmela Castro, Fatou Diatta, and Anna Taylor, have changed so

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many lives. They have helped many people through direct interactions and spreading of

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awareness of

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many issues in icting harm throughout sections of the world, and are continuing in their advocacy and practical methods.

The event in Lancaster was hosted in the auditorium of Steinman Hall in Millersville University’s Ware Center. The event began at 6:15pm with panel of some Lancaster’s locally living Women’s Right activists. The panel included Almaz E. Amante a volunteer for Keystone Human Resources, Dr. Carol Davis a professor at Franklin and Marshall College and founder of the chartable theatre organization of the Nepal Health Project, Brittany Le er a sexual assault counselor at Lancaster’s YWCA, Julie Peachey the director of Innovations for Poverty Action, and three faculty from Millersville University; Dr. Kimberly A. Maha y a professor in sociology and coordinator in the campus’s O ce of Diversity and Social Justice, Dr. Wanja Ogongi a professor in social work and works on international human rights for women and children, and Dr. Elizabeth Powers a professor of children’s education a current chair of the Commission on the Status of Women at Millersville University. The commentary of the panel began with worldly view of how change is coming about through advocacy e orts of various people and how those e orts started. Ms. Brittany Le er took a di erent approach as she asked the audience to directly relate the issues presented in the lm to Lancaster area itself because she explained, “Little Stones was a lm that moved me to make the connection between worldwide gender-based violence and what’s happening in our own community. Lancaster County has all of the problems that we saw in the lm: domestic abuse, sexual assault, human tra cking, wage inequality, and gender-based poverty.” The nal commentator, Dr. Carol Davis, surmised the documentary for the audience when she explained that she believed the hidden message of the documentary is that everyone has the ability to advocate for equal gender rights, or as she poetically put it, “We are little stones being cast and causing ripple e ects.”

After a brief intermission the documentary started a few minutes after 7pm with music encompassing the auditorium. The stage lit up with the title screen of a mosaic of “little stones” that rotated to show depictions of the di erent art-forms of dance, song, painting, and craftsmanship that are used as the advocacy tools of the four advocates in the documentary. Afterwards, the lm began its storytelling.

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The rst advocate that inspired Director Sophia Kruz to create the Little Stones documentary is Sohini Chakraborty, who is a dancer and sociologist from India, and uses her talents in Dance Movement Therapy to help women and children who have escaped and survived the sex tra cking industry. She does through the organization Kolkata Sanved, which she founded. In her advocacy she has a ected 10s of thousands of lives with survivor even achieving acceptance to a preeminent dance school.

Panmela Castro is a gra ti artist in Brazil, who creates expressive artworks throughout her city that symbolize the trauma associated with domestic violence. Even though she has become a star in the gra ti world through the awareness she spreads from the walls of building to building, she also goes into school to explain the issues of domestic abuse to students through the same artful implementation in the classrooms.

Fatou Diatta is a Hip-Hop artist from Senegal with the stage name of Sister Fa. She uses her music primarily in her home country to advocate for the end of a cultural practice that encompasses West Africa, and medically harms women through trauma and reduction in immunity to various fatal diseases, including AIDs. She has faced even lifethreatening opposition from communities she has been to, but explains those are the places she needs to advocate the most. Nowadays her advocacy has spread from West Africa to Europe where the practice has been illegally happening as well.

Anna Taylor is a United States fashion designer that has worked with a seamstress named Judith in Kenya since her college years. They developed a clothing and jewelry business around the culture of the country, Judith and James, that directly funds the education of women in the slums of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The women are given livable salaries and meals to support their families at the same time of the education and craftsmanship.

The business has gotten successful to the point where they won the New York Fashion Week.

The documentary travels back and forth across the world between these stories as they begin to entail the obstacles and inner feelings of the activists.

The lives of the activists and the in-depth motives are shown, sometimes to a graphic and provocative point that caused the Lancaster audience to get mixed emotions.

After the documentary nished the applause came with the entire auditorium of Steinman. The director of the movie, Sophia Kruz, walked on to stage for the commentary and explained how the idea for the documentary started when she came to across the e orts of Shahoni Chakraborty, and then how her curiosity of others advocacy attempts in indi erent countries around the globe led her to Panmella Castro, and later the others. Little Stones was meant to further spread the awareness of the needed human rights that these advocates were pursuing. She complemented the panel and agreement she concluded with a statement for all future advocates for women’s rights as human rights, “Yes, we are all those little stones” meaning that we all can contribute to the mosaic of human rights.

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