Bremen Donovan

Big Mouth explores new and existing forms of public testimony against sexual violence in Conakry, Guinea. Based on years of ethnographic research with journalists, lawyers, and activists, the film immerses audiences in their professional and personal worlds as they navigate debates, censure, conflict, political instability and mutual support. The film follows three women—Yéro, an investigative journalist; Halimatou, a lawyer; and Rama, a young activist—who are confronting a series of threats and actions against the press, survivors of violence and their allies. All three women are ‘big mouths’, operating at the edge between speaking out and saying too much. The film moves between different spaces of testimony—from courtrooms to newsrooms and from TV screens to the streets—to consider how evidence is produced, animated and interpreted both in the legal system and beyond it. It combines original footage with archives and press coverage, drawing resonances of history into the present. Through this approach, it weaves together legal anthropology, African feminism, and the anthropology of media to advance anthropological understandings of how people seek agency, justice, and solidarity. The legal cases at the center of this story—concerning defamation, press freedom, violence, and survival—show the stakes of efforts to define speech and its limits.