Set Yourself on Fire

Darnell Lamont Walker traveled the world, visiting South Africa, the United Kingdom, and his home country, USA, talking with survivors, their family, their friends, and experts on the subject, collecting footage to eventually make this film. Walker recruited Tonja Renée Stidhum to help produce, knowing she would be able to contribute greatly with her talents and skills, and they created this conversation about rape and sexual assault. For many of those voices featured in this documentary, it is their first time speaking of their assault. For others, it became a way to help others make it through those dark times that inevitably come. "Our hope is that this film at least begins a conversation or twenty," Walker says. “On college campuses, in community centers, churches, police stations, clinics, classrooms, office spaces, street corners, and everywhere else,” Stidhum adds. The title, Set Yourself on Fire, comes from Warsan Shire's well-known poem, "In Love and War." She says, “To my daughter I will say, 'when the men come, set yourself on fire'." (Pan African Film Festival)