Silent Scars SEEKING RESTITUTION IN TORI GARRETT’S DON’T TELL
Has any other matter received such persistent and disturbing attention in media reportage these days as the sexual abuse of children in schools, most commonly boarding schools? Two equally repulsive aspects of this phenomenon are the lasting emotional and psychological scarring that seems to become the lot of the victims as well as the urge of the institutions at fault to cover up offences in order to preserve their public image. Now we have an admirable Australian film that takes on this difficult subject. Based on a real-life case, Tori Garrett’s feature debut, Don’t Tell (2017), takes a serious theme and treats it with impressive intelligence and fair-mindedness. This is a film that deserves much more attention than it seems to have received. And I don’t want to make this sound merely polemical: it is, as well, a very compelling piece of filmmaking.
Don’t Tell opens with a shot of a pair of female legs making their way up a rural hillside until their owner reaches the haystack she wants to sit on. In a way, this visual recalls the moving near-symmetry employed by John Ford in his masterwork The Searchers (1956), with Garrett likewise choosing to close her film using a paralleled image. In these opening moments, the young woman (Sara West) perched on the haystack challenges, ‘Okay,
