The Anita Hill Documentary Can Teach a New Generation About Sexual Harassment

By Dodai Stewart | January 21, 2013 | 9:20pm

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Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival, the documentary titled Anita premiered. In the film, director Frieda Mock takes a look back at a look at Anita Hill and her sexual harassment testimony during Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation. Deadline Hollywood reports that Ms.Hill attended the premiere and that the law professor received a standing ovation.

In the Sundance Channel clip above, Ms. Hill and Ms. Mock discuss the question “why now?” Mock says that she felt that 20 years later, it was important not only to look back, but “re-encapsulate” the story and relate it to what is going on now. Ms. Hill called the experience of looking back at what she went through “shocking” and “painful” but also stresses that she thinks it’s important that a whole new generation understand the impact the hearings had. After all, it’ been 20 years, and a new generation is entering schools and workplaces and situations in which sexual harassment could rear its ugly head. “In some ways, the issues have stayed so much the same,” Ms. Hill says. (For more from the festival, check out SundanceChannel.com/festival.)