Even though her film is about to get a premiere at Hollywood’s legendary Chinese Theatre, Gina Garcia is not your typical filmmaker – and her movie is not your typical movie.
“Untold: This is My Story” has been a longtime dream project for the U.S. Navy veteran, who was already a successful entrepreneur before starting her film career. And even though she made it about herself, it’s far from a vanity project. Instead, it’s a bold testament aimed at helping countless others who, like her, carry the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
As an 8-year-old growing up in Orlando, Fla., Garcia was at the mall with her mother and sister when she was abducted by a man who coerced her into his car before sexually assaulting her at knifepoint. Remarkably, she was able to escape by jumping out of the moving vehicle, half naked, and running away through the parking lot. The incident was never discussed by the family; and young Gina, who had only vague memories of what happened to her, went on to experience years of self-destructive behavior and strained relationships with her parents and siblings. Twenty-five years after the fact, she finally sought help at a Veterans’ Administration hospital, where she was diagnosed with PTSD and began the difficult process of healing.
Fast forward to 2009, when Garcia enrolled at a film school in the Philippines. It was a bold step that started her on the path to tell her story for the many other anonymous survivors she knew were out there needing to know that they were not alone. She wrote a screenplay, and when she attended a screening that gave her an opportunity to meet filmmaker Patty Jenkins, she approached the “Monster” director with the thought that here was someone who could direct it. Instead, Jenkins told her, “No Gina, you have to tell your story.”
That meeting led to an ongoing mentorship, and three years later Garcia was filming her screenplay with a cast that featured former Calvin Klein model Jennifer Rubin and esteemed womens’ rights attorney Gloria Allred.
The resulting movie is rough to watch, and that’s not because it has a DIY feel – although it does, which somehow gives it an even more searing authenticity. It is shot through with first-hand awareness of the way trauma affects not just the victim, but all those around them, and manifests itself in every aspect of their lives. It’s painful, horrifying, heartbreaking, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch, with a realistic depiction of mental health treatment that is a far cry from the kind of overwrought psychodrama treatment Hollywood usually gives to subject matter like this.
Why then, did it take nearly a decade for it to premiere?
Talking with the Blade, the first-time director explained what happened.
GINA GARCIA: I’m not a Hollywood person, I wasn’t going to be a director. My goal in making it was to peel off the Band-Aid, to show the rawness of trauma. I wanted to show the real – but when you’re raising money, everybody wants you to do something that isn’t real. Initially, when I wrote the script and I was sending it out, I had feedback like, “Can you make it a boy? Can you make it a white family? Can they not be gay? Do you really have to be a lesbian?” But then I would be telling somebody else’s story, and I wanted to tell my story.
BLADE: Obviously you didn’t go with all those suggestions.
GARCIA: No, but still I had all these people telling me to put in a little of this, a little of that. I ended up with this love story in there, and all this other stuff. And I did a couple of screenings, and I got everybody else’s opinions on my movie – and I hated it and I didn’t want to release it. So I put it on the shelf.
BLADE: What made you change your mind all these years later?
GARCIA: Well, I know now that I had more healing to do. I was still broken, going through issues with trauma and triggers. But at Thanksgiving of this past year my brother watched the film, and he said ‘You have to get this out. It’s gonna help a lot of people.’ I struggled with that, because I felt like I made myself look like a victim, but he said, ‘You need to recut it, then. You’re not a victim, you’ve gotten to the other side, you’re a different person now. You have fresh eyes.’ So in the beginning of 2021 I recut the entire movie. I took out all the Hollywood fluff, and I went back to the very basics of my original script.
BLADE: Not many directors get the chance to set a project aside and come back to it later.
GARCIA: Taking that time to be able to step away from it for a couple of years and work on myself as a human, and then get to come back and recut it – I love my movie now!
BLADE: What’s the next step after your Hollywood premiere?
GARCIA: Hopefully a distributor will buy it and not want to recut it their way. But either way, my intention is to do a city-to-city tour of the film, kind of like the “No Hate” campaign. I have a non-profit that I’m starting with my tribe back home, it’s called the ‘Untold Project,’ and with the tour we’re going to start doing videos of people telling their own untold stories, and hopefully helping other sexual abuse survivors to have their voices be heard.
Because for me it’s more than a movie. There are one in three women and one in six men who are survivors of sexual abuse. If you do the math that’s over a billion people on the planet. We can talk about heart disease and all these other diseases that people die from, but people are also dying from this kind of abuse – through suicide, alcohol, and drug addiction. If you think about people who dealt with abuse in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, even into the ‘80s – I mean, there’s a reason why all the Catholic Church stuff happened, why the Boy Scouts stuff happened, the Sandusky trials, the gymnasts. It’s because nobody was talking about what was happening. Nobody wants to put a magnifying glass on the dirty little secret when it’s the uncle, the cousin, the coach, the babysitter.
If we can create the resources, maybe we can have the ability to have real conversations so that people can heal from this kind of trauma.
BLADE: And you want to show people that healing is possible.
GARCIA: Put it this way: I used to want to hide the fact that I was broken. Now here I am wanting to project it on a 45-foot screen.
If you live in LA, “Untold: This is My Story” screens at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Monday, Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. If not, Gina Garcia will soon bring it to a town near you.
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