Rob Munday
Undercover police officers have infiltrated UK activist networks and forged relationships with individual women for over 50 years, some fathering children with them. In Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s documentary, We Did Not Consent, three women – disguised by theatrical masks – who were targeted by ‘spy cops’ seek to take charge of their own stories by devising emblematic scenes to be dissected and redirected. It’s a powerful act of creativity untangling years of personal trauma.
“The women felt their personal stories were often misrepresented or overlooked”
“I met the women while making a play about the ‘spy cops’ scandal with Breach theatre”, Allen-Pickard explains and the theatrical roots of the project carry over into We Did Not Consent through the use of masks and staged reenactments. If you’re expecting this “staged” approach to weaken the impact of the film, think again, as Allen-Pickard’s 18-minute film uses a creative approach to ensure these women get to share their stories on their own terms.
The masks, while designed to protect the identities of the women sharing their experiences, don’t create a barrier between the viewers and their stories. Instead, by involving the women directly in the retelling of events, the approach makes their recollections feel even more personal and impactful. “The women felt their personal stories were often misrepresented or overlooked,” Allen-Pickard explains. Together, they sought to “find a method where these reductive versions of their life stories could play out and the women could interrupt and redirect them to reveal something that was more true to them.”
“After making the play, we felt that we wanted to build on this collaboration and keep working on the subject, so we started to discuss how we might approach it as a short film.” – director Dorothy Allen-Pickard
Though the filmmaker and her collaborators penned a script “informed by the many conversations we’d had”, Allen-Pickard encouraged her participators “to make spontaneous interjections” during filming. Revealing that this flexibility led to some “strong emotional reactions” on set and helped the short become even more authentic and intimate for the women involved.
In documentary filmmaking, trust between a director and their participants is crucial to achieving a shared vision. For We Did Not Consent, where the women had been systematically lied to for years, building that trust was particularly vital. “By the time we were shooting and editing the film, I felt confident that we all agreed on the film we were making”, Allen-Pickard explains as she discusses building trust. With the filmmaker adding that the women “were given opportunities to review and provide input throughout key stages of the production”, so that they could “trust the decisions we made in how we were framing their stories”.
We Did Not Consent serves as a powerful step toward raising awareness of these injustices. Since completing the short, Allen-Pickard has remained in close contact with the participants and is now developing “a hybrid feature” with one of the women from the film.