Submitted by the Friday Harbor Film Festival Winter Series

The view from Amy Herdy’s home office involves bald eagles perching on thick evergreens and a lush green pasture where her horses graze and last spring’s filly scampered about, and provides stark relief from her work investigating social justice issues such as sexual assault.

San Juan Island’s Pacific Northwest scenery provides the lifestyle that Herdy and her husband sought by moving here in 2014, and gives Herdy the breaks she needs from the demands of her job as a producer for Chain Camera Pictures, a documentary filmmaking company whose film “The Hunting Ground” won an “Audience Choice” award at last year’s Friday Harbor Film Festival. As such, “The Hunting Ground,” which is about this country’s epidemic of campus sexual assault, will air as part of the Festival’s winter screening series on March 1 at 7 p.m. at The Grange at 152 1st St. in Friday Harbor, and Herdy will be available afterward for a discussion of the film.

Herdy’s role for “The Hunting Ground” was investigative producer, which entailed research and interviewing dozens of subjects, both on and off camera. What she learned, she says, is that sexual assault is a serious problem on nearly every college campus in the U.S., and that the survivors who bravely spoke on camera for the film are to be commended for helping bring the issue out of the shadows.

“For too long, many of these survivors–both women and men–have suffered in silence,” Herdy said, “which only tragically adds to their shame. What we wanted to show was that they are not alone, they are not at fault, and there are solutions schools could put in place to prevent sexual assault and protect students.”

“I hope that people attend the screening and engage in conversation about this topic,” she added, “because that’s the first step toward fixing it.”