They refused to be silent: how a filmmaker and an activist fight sexual violence through stories

The festival opens with two women who would not stay quiet

The Singapore Writers Festival opens on Friday, 13 November 2026, for its 29th edition, and it opens with a pairing that sets the tone for the ten days to come. The festival runs until 22 November under the theme Hidden in Plain Sight, with more than 200 programmes and more than 300 writers, speakers and moderators. Its two headliners for the opening weekend are Japanese filmmaker Shiori Ito and Indonesian human rights activist Kamala Chandrakirana, and both women are in Singapore to talk about the same subject from opposite ends of Asia: how storytelling can expose sexual violence that institutions preferred to leave unseen.

Ito takes part in a panel on Saturday at 11.30am, Truth on Trial: Fighting to Be Heard, followed by a post-screening discussion of her documentary Black Box Diaries at 3.30pm, and a panel on investigative journalism on Sunday at 11.30am. Chandrakirana delivers the festival keynote on Saturday at 7.30pm, Cultural Memory in the Pursuit of Equality, and joins a panel on the impact of women’s stories on Sunday at 8pm. The festival is organised by the Arts House Group and commissioned by the National Arts Council.

Two records of assault, built case by case

Shiori Ito, 37, publicly accused prominent Japanese journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi of raping her in 2015, when she was a 25-year-old intern seeking work. Prosecutors decided not to indict Yamaguchi in 2016, and in May 2017 she held a press conference at the Tokyo District Court and identified herself publicly, saying going public was the only way to be taken seriously. She told her story in her 2017 book Black Box, a reference to the opaque justice system survivors face, and in her documentary Black Box Diaries, which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards and won a Peabody Award. In December 2019 a Tokyo court found Yamaguchi liable for sexual assault and ordered him to pay 3.3 million yen in damages, a ruling Japan’s Supreme Court upheld in 2022. The film was not shown in Japan until December 2025, after a long delay over footage and permissions.

Kamala Chandrakirana, 66, documented accounts of sexual violence committed during Indonesia’s May 1998 riots, when hundreds of women, most of them Chinese-Indonesian women from poor backgrounds, were assaulted while the authorities denied that any assaults had taken place. She joined volunteer activists in recording survivors’ accounts, and together they documented more than 85 attacks, a figure she believes is far below the true number. Their work helped establish Indonesia’s National Commission on Violence Against Women, known as Komnas Perempuan, in October 1998. Chandrakirana served as its secretary general from 1998 to 2003 and its chairperson from 2003 to 2009. The commission began publishing an annual report on violence against women in 2001, and in 2004 it succeeded in having domestic abuse redefined from a private matter between spouses to a state-recognised crime. Nearly three decades after the riots, she says some Indonesian officials still deny the assaults happened.

What the records still cannot settle

Neither record is complete, and both women say so themselves. The full scale of the May 1998 assaults is still unknown: most victims stayed silent out of shame, stigma and fear of retaliation, no official count exists, and the denial from parts of the Indonesian state has never been formally withdrawn. No one has been prosecuted for the assaults. In Japan, the 2023 revision of the country’s century-old sexual offences law, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and redefined rape as nonconsensual intercourse, is on the books, but it is too early to measure whether it changes outcomes for survivors who report assaults. The festival itself cannot answer the question both women keep returning to: how many survivors will hear these stories and find the safety to tell their own, and how many will decide, as Ito herself advises, that sharing is not safe for them.

Testimony as the only evidence when the state looks away

The pairing matters because the two cases share the same mechanism. In both, the formal route to accountability failed first. Japanese prosecutors declined to indict Yamaguchi, and Indonesian officials denied the 1998 assaults altogether. In both, the written and filmed record became the accountability mechanism instead: a memoir and a documentary in one case, a volunteer archive that grew into a national commission in the other. The record did not only console survivors. It changed institutions. Japan revised its sexual offences law in 2023, and Indonesia gained a permanent national mechanism for women’s human rights that still publishes its annual report. The festival puts that mechanism on a public stage in Singapore, a city that presents itself as orderly and well governed, and asks its audiences to look at what orderly systems can hide. The theme, Hidden in Plain Sight, is the point: the violence was never hidden from the victims, only from the record.

Storytelling is not the soft option, it is the procedure

It is tempting to describe what Ito and Chandrakirana do as awareness raising, as if the story were the soft accompaniment to the real work of courts and commissions. The record says the opposite. Storytelling was the procedure. Ito used the tools of journalism, a book, a film, court filings, against a system that protects prominent men, and she did it while the criminal case was closed to her. Chandrakirana used documentation as institution building: the testimonies she collected with volunteers became the evidence base for a commission that the state then had to create, fund and answer to. In both cases, narrative did the work that formal institutions refused to do, and then the institutions followed the narrative. That is also why the festival’s framing matters. A writers festival could have booked two famous names and left it at biography. Instead it booked two women whose work is about the gap between what happened and what was recorded, and it put them at the centre of a festival whose theme is what societies fail to see. The 5D reading is straightforward: geopolitics decides which stories get a hearing, economics decides who can afford to tell them, demographics decides whose suffering counts, history decides which denials survive, and technology decides how fast a testimony travels. Ito and Chandrakirana worked all five dimensions at once, with nothing but the record.

The second-order effects reach the law itself

The effects of both women’s work now run beyond their own cases. Japan’s 2023 law reform changed the definition of rape and the age of consent, a revision that campaigners had sought for years and that Ito’s public fight helped make unavoidable. Indonesia’s commission became a model for how a national human rights mechanism can grow out of volunteer documentation rather than the other way around. Chandrakirana went on to serve on a United Nations working group on discrimination against women, carrying the 1998 documentation into international law. There is a second-order risk, too, and both women name it. Testimony can become spectacle, and a festival stage can turn a survivor’s story into entertainment. Ito’s own advice to survivors is careful: if sharing feels dangerous, do not share, and society should build safe places for victims to decide for themselves when and how to speak. The festival’s test is whether its audiences leave with that caution as well as with the stories.

What to watch after the festival closes

The immediate test is the weekend itself. Ito’s panel on Saturday morning and Chandrakirana’s keynote on Saturday evening are the two sessions the festival has built its opening around, and both will be watched for how frank the discussion gets about the institutions each woman confronted. The festival runs until 22 November, with more than 200 programmes, and the question for the organisers is whether the theme, Hidden in Plain Sight, carries beyond the opening weekend into the crime writing, translation and documentary strands. Beyond Singapore, the open questions are practical: whether Black Box Diaries finds wider distribution in Japan after its delayed premiere, whether Indonesia’s government ever formally acknowledges the May 1998 assaults, and whether the commission model Chandrakirana helped build features in regional debates about violence against women. None of those questions will be settled in a festival hall. All of them start there.