Content note: This article discusses sexual harm, consent and survivor-centered advocacy.

Isabella Cohn’s documentary Watch You Rise has added actor and advocate Indya Moore and Dr. Annie Farmer as executive producers ahead of its October premiere at the Denver Film Festival. The film investigates sexual harm through conversations with survivors, perpetrators and experts, focusing on the difficult intersections of sex, power and consent.

Cohn co-wrote the documentary with Maria Marrone. Elizabeth Woodward and Marina Hunt produced through Willa, while CAA is handling domestic sales. Moore and Farmer join documentarian Judith Helfand and Mary Recine on the executive-producer roster.

The project’s scope is rooted in Cohn’s own coming-of-age process. She began making Watch You Rise when she was 17, while examining stories of sexual harm that affected her mother’s generation, people around her and, eventually, her own life. Rather than presenting the issue as a distant social problem, the film is positioned as an inquiry into the ways people learn—or fail to learn—how to recognize boundaries, communicate clearly and reckon with the impact of their actions.

A film about the conversations people are not always taught to have

The central language around consent can sound simple in principle: agreement to participate in an activity. But the documentary’s stated interest in gray areas points to the surrounding realities that can make those conversations complicated: differences in power, unclear boundaries, social expectations, prior experiences and the possibility that harm may be unintentional while still requiring recognition and accountability.

Watch You Rise appears designed to hold that complexity without using it to excuse harm. Its question is not merely how people identify extreme cases after the fact, but what it might take to interrupt recurring patterns before they continue. That distinction matters. A conversation about prevention is broader than a conversation about punishment; it asks what knowledge, language, support and cultural expectations can help people build healthier intimate dynamics in the first place.

Cohn has described the film as a record of Gen Z coming of age amid highly public reckonings over sexual violence. For her generation, public headlines, survivor testimony and political arguments have existed alongside the period in which many people are having their earliest sexual experiences. The film’s framing recognizes a gap between being surrounded by discussion and being equipped with usable tools.

Those tools can include vocabulary for naming discomfort, an understanding that boundaries are worth voicing and respecting, and space to discuss impact honestly. The source material does not present the documentary as a curriculum or a substitute for professional support. It does, however, place young people’s insight at the center of the discussion rather than treating them solely as an audience to be instructed.

Why Moore and Farmer’s roles matter

Moore, known for Pose and Father Mother Sister Brother, called the project personal and emphasized the value of seeing young people model boundaries. Moore said the film helped provide language for recognizing nuanced forms of harm in intimate relationships, including circumstances where harm occurs unintentionally.

“The young people in this film are the teachers I wish I’d had,” Moore said.

That observation fits the film’s stated approach. Expertise in a documentary can come from specialists and survivors, but it can also come from people articulating what they have lived through and what they needed to know earlier. Moore’s involvement connects the film’s themes to advocacy around youth, identity and gender violence, all areas Cohn identified as closely aligned with the project.

Farmer, a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, said that changing the hearts and minds of younger generations is essential to moving forward on sexual violence. She also stressed the need for relatable opportunities for young people to engage with the subject.

“Young people are both most likely to become victims of sex crimes and to perpetrate those crimes,” Farmer said.

Her point underscores why the film’s post-screening plans may be as consequential as the festival premiere itself. A documentary can create a shared point of reference, but a difficult subject needs a setting in which viewers can process what they have seen, ask questions and avoid being left alone with an overwhelming reaction. The project’s impact campaign is meant to create that setting.

‘Let’s Talk Sex’ moves beyond the screening

Watch You Rise will be accompanied by an impact campaign titled Let’s Talk Sex. The campaign plans to train Youth Ambassadors to facilitate post-screening conversations around the United States. Moore and Farmer are expected to take part in panels and public discussions connected with the film.

An impact campaign is a structured effort to extend a nonfiction film’s purpose outside the theater. In this case, the emphasis is on discussion and youth leadership rather than simply awareness. The distinction is practical: awareness can tell an audience that a problem exists, while facilitated dialogue can give people a chance to consider how the issue appears in relationships, communities and their own communication.

The campaign is working with RAINN, which operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, and YWCA USA, an organization focused on racial justice and women’s empowerment. It is also partnering with the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, described as a temporary art installation and public archive organized by the Institute for Primary Fact.

These partnerships suggest a campaign built around multiple ways of engaging with the subject: support resources, community discussion, advocacy and public-memory work. That does not mean every screening conversation will have the same format or outcome. It does mean the project has identified an intention to build infrastructure around the film rather than treating its premiere as the end of its public life.

Education remains a live policy question

The documentary and campaign arrive during renewed debate about what young people should be taught concerning sex, consent and healthy relationships. In 2026, the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program retained roughly $101 million in annual funding. The Trump administration sought changes to the administration of the program’s grants, including requirements emphasizing abstinence, but a federal judge blocked those requirements while litigation continues.

That policy background does not determine what Watch You Rise says or how audiences will respond to it. It does illustrate why the film’s underlying question is politically and personally charged: who provides young people with information about relationships, and what kind of information do they receive?

For viewers, it is useful to separate several related terms that are often collapsed into one debate:

  • Sex education can refer broadly to information about sex, bodies, pregnancy, health and relationships.
  • Consent education focuses on mutual agreement, communication, boundaries and respect.
  • Healthy-relationship education addresses interpersonal dynamics, including power, emotional safety, behavior and accountability.
  • Abstinence is the choice not to engage in sexual activity; an abstinence emphasis is a particular approach within wider education-policy debates.

Those subjects overlap, but they are not interchangeable. The film’s stated focus on power, consent, healing and cycles of harm places it particularly close to the latter two categories. Its campaign’s use of post-screening facilitators also indicates an emphasis on discussion—an approach that acknowledges that receiving information and learning how to apply it in real life are different tasks.

What audiences can reasonably expect

No wider release plan, ticket information or platform availability has been specified. What is confirmed is an October Denver Film Festival premiere, domestic sales representation by CAA and a related national discussion campaign.

Based on the project description, audiences should expect a documentary that engages directly with challenging material and does not reduce sexual harm to a single kind of encounter or a single group of people. It will bring together accounts from survivors, perpetrators and experts in an attempt to examine the structures and assumptions that can enable harm.

That is necessarily sensitive territory. The film’s guiding idea, however, is not that young people are passive recipients of a crisis created around them. Cohn’s approach argues that they have agency, insight and a role in shaping better conversations. Moore’s response similarly emphasizes the value of finding words for experiences that may otherwise remain difficult to name.

For a culture accustomed to treating the subject either as a headline or a private ordeal, the proposed contribution of Watch You Rise is a more sustained space for reflection: what people were taught, what they missed, how power can affect intimate situations and how communities might make honest conversations easier to begin.

Broader debates over young people’s safety, platforms and regulation are also continuing in technology and gaming policy, as covered in the proposed EU Kids Act’s age-check and parental-control provisions. The issues are not identical, but both discussions turn on a basic question of how institutions respond when younger people need meaningful protection, information and agency.