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Devastating 'The Hunting Ground' looks at the rape epidemic on U.S. campuses (A-)

One by one, they tell their stories, each of them frighteningly similar. They go something like this: He came up to me at a party. He took me into another room. He raped me. And the university told me not to rock the boat.

You'd have to live under a rock to remain unaware of the rape epidemic on American college campuses. Kirby Dick's enraging documentary The Hunting Ground puts a series of living, breathing faces on this crisis, but it also accomplishes something more important. It casts a shadow of shame on the university officials who systematically cover up and deny any wrongdoing within their hallowed gates (and who, not surprisingly, did not consent to be interviewed for this film).

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The Hunting Ground starts with a montage of teenage girls jubilantly receiving the most exciting news of their lives: admission to the college they've been dreaming of. "Pomp and Circumstance" plays on the soundtrack. But we know the celebratory tone is a very temporary and highly effective rhetorical device, designed to set up the string of violations and injustices to follow.

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Dick, whose Oscar-nominated doc The Invisible War looked at rape in the military, supplies alarming (and footnoted) statistics throughout the film. We see interviews with countless victims, and even one perpetrator. And we see clearly that campus rape isn't just a Florida State University problem, even as it explores the case against that football program's star quarterback, Jameis Winston; or a University of North Carolina problem, even though the two heroes of the story went to school there (more on them shortly).

Victim and anti-rape activist Andrea Pino
Victim and anti-rape activist Andrea Pino(Radius-TWC)
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Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Swarthmore and on and on. The documentary says they have all harbored rapists, and they have generally placed their reputations and fundraising abilities ahead of justice for the victims. It seems universities have a harder time soliciting money when they're associated with rape stories. Better, they figure, to dissuade official reports and punishment, especially when star athletes are involved.

Annie Clark and Andrea Pino aren't having it. Both women were raped early in their careers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and both were stonewalled when they filed their complaints with the university. This is how activists are born. Clark and Pino joined forces. They didn't hide their identities. They reached out to other college rape victims, and they have pioneered the use of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in any federally funded educational institution, to put the heat on universities.

Thanks largely to Clark and Pino, the Department of Justice is now investigating 95 colleges and universities for failure to investigate sexual assault. Their efforts give a reason to hope.

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Clark and Pino are now activists, and The Hunting Ground qualifies as activist filmmaking. More power to it. You can read all the statistics you want, but there's no substitute for bearing witness - especially in such overwhelming numbers. There is no gray area here. Rape is a horrific crime, and institutions that try to sweep it under the rug deserve all the shaming they get.

THE HUNTING GROUND (A-)

Directed by Kirby Dick. PG-13 (disturbing thematic material involving sexual assault and for language). 90 mins. At the Landmark Magnolia and the Angelika Plano.