Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

The story is about a game changer who Spoke Truth to Power. This film is about the life and times of Anita Hill whose graphic, sensational testimony about sexual harassment in the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation Hearings altered the trajectory of her life and our country’s policies on sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, on college campuses and the military.

Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a feature documentary by Academy-Award-winning director Freida Mock, tells the harrowing and inspiring story of Anita Hill, the elegant, dignified African-American woman who charged Supreme-Court nominee Clarence Thomas with sexual harassment in 1991 Senate hearings. The hearings were pure, raw, gripping theater, watched by millions on national television: a struggle between a man with everything to gain and a woman with everything to lose. The event brought sexual politics into the national consciousness, and empowered Anita Hill’s fight for social justice. This will be Hill’s story in a literal sense: for the first and only time, she’ll participate in a film about her life before, during, and after the hearings. How did a religious, conservative, bookish African-American – the last of thirteen children in a devout family on a remote Oklahoma farm – become a venerated and hated American icon, brought unwillingly to fame by the raw and rowdy intersection of sex, politics, and power?

Trailer

Press

“Political theater that still has the power to make your blood boil.”

Kenneth Turan, LA Times

“A powerful film…recreates the national sensibility of the time when seual harassment in the workplace was not yet a national concern.”

The Hollywood Reporter

“Sundance 2013: Anita Hill documentary shows power of the truth”

Thestar.com

“A true hero of our time.”

Melissa Silverstein, Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood

“One woman, stepping into a mess of political, racial and sexual power plays…makes for rapt viewing.”

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Premieres & Awards

Official Selection

Sundance 2013

AFI Docs Film Festival

Closing Night

Human Rights Film Festival

Opening Night

Hot Docs

International Premiere