About Watch You Rise

WATCH YOU RISE follows Isabella, a young filmmaker coming of age, as she pulls on a thread of sexual violence running through her and her peers lives that reshapes her relationship with her mother and sparks a deeply personal investigation into trauma, power, and the gray areas of consent. Isabella travels the country speaking to young people who reveal truths they've never spoken aloud. Youths share that sex education is failing us, existing pathways for coming forward feel inaccessible and unsafe, and people causing harm don’t exist in a vacuum; harmful behavior has a context, one which repeats and unfolds into itself. Alongside youth testimonies, an intergenerational perspective is brought in through interviews with Isabella's mother and adult experts, including psychologist and Epstein/Maxwell survivor, Annie Farmer. Experts support Isabella and her peers' questions about the roots of harm, inviting the audience to learn alongside Isabella and her peers in their journey of inquiry. A year into making the film, Isabella is sexually assaulted. She joins her peers, and together they relate to the layered realities of harm, silence, and shame in a world that rarely offers the tools for understanding cycles of sexual assault. Throughout it all, the mother-daughter relationship ebbs and flows, and builds a conversation that calls in those affected by sexual harm, particularly, youth, who are so rarely given the tools to navigate what they carry.