Suffolk University Law Professor Kate Nace Day‘s documentary film A Civil Remedy will be shown on Saturday, April 26, 2012 at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square. If you’re in the Boston area or planning to be there, the screening will be followed by a panel discussion. Here are the details:

A Civil Remedy (2012). Directed by Kate Nace Day (20 min + Q&A Panel)

A CIVIL REMEDY is a short documentary film that tells the story of one sex trafficking victim who survived – an American girl who was trafficked into prostitution in Boston at the age of seventeen, escaped to her family, and survived to finish school and become an anti-trafficking advocate.

Against this backdrop, the film weaves the perspectives of three commentators. Gloria Steinem has led the American women’s rights movement for four decades. Alicia Foley is the Founder of The Boston Initiative to Advance Human Rights. Siddharth Kara, Fellow on Human Trafficking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is best known for his economic analysis of sex trafficking in SEX TRAFFICKING: INSIDE THE BUSINESS OF MODERN SLAVERY.

A CIVIL REMEDY explores the importance of survivors’ stories, the meaning of justice, and the need to place new legal tools in the hands of victims. A civil remedy – a state civil action for money damages – will empower victims to reclaim their equal place in their community, see their violators held accountable, and drain resources from the global sex industry.

A panel of conversation and commentary with photojournalists and documentary filmmakers who are developing sex trafficking stories will follow the screening.

More info about the screening is available here.

Professor Day is the founder of Film and Law Productions. Here’s a description of that project:

Film and Law Productions has it roots inside the law school classroom in pedagogical experiments with storytelling, film and filmmaking….Law’s stories take the form of dialogue, a highly structured, almost architectural exchange of questions and answers that translates the messy details of human stories—bodies and emotions, social contexts, and moral doubts—into apparently neutral and universal stories of written texts, precedent, and authority. Law’s stories say simply, “this is what law is.”

Film and Law Productions presents other stories – stories as vibrant retellings of law that render visible what law does. These stories bring us back from the abstract to the real, from the general to the personal and particular.”

Source here.

-Bridget Crawford