It all began with a picture. I remember the first time I saw, in the middle of the darkness and floating on the horizon of the Lake Victoria, in Kenya, an imaginary city formed by the lights that fishermen used to fish. It seemed a world apart, a magical place, and I felt profoundly attracted to it. But as I was going into that world, the magic started to disappear and a bleak reality began to emerge.

The picture was taken from a small island with one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world, around 30% of its population, and the fishermen who came from different places to make a living merely exacerbated the situation. Fishing was the only real job on the island and, economically, women were completely dependent on men. With money, they thought they were entitled to everything, and they only drank alcohol and cheated and raped women and girls. They didn’t even care about the age.

The complete silence around this reality was disheartening. We spoke with dozens of girls and women of different ages. Some of them told us their story; others, just without saying anything, they said everything. It was hard to see how the cultural traditions and the lack of affection and protection towards daughters in the families forced many of them to fear telling what happened to them, even to their parents. The stigma was there, and this law of silence put the blame on the girls, condemning them forever to live dead in life.

F.A.A. (initials to maintain her anonymity) was one of them. With emotions running high, she told us how her life ended when, as a girl child, she was raped and couldn’t tell what happened to nobody. Listening to her was the most powerful and emotional experience of the journey. We were captivated by her sensitivity and her ability to turn emotions into words, as if she had never stopped thinking about what happened. She was the one who really made us understand what girls and women really felt on the island.

In that moment we realized that the HIV/AIDS and poverty rates, the name of the island and even the real name of F.A.A. went into the background. We had to immerse the viewer in her inner world, create an emotional bond with her, and make the viewer discover through her eyes the reality behind the lights in the night on the Lake Victoria. In the end, even if it seemed so, we weren’t in another world, and besides the physical distance between the facts and their own cruelty, the silence that kills women and girls is the same in the whole world.