Last month, the first video footage of the Japanese military’s sexual slaves was discovered in the US National Archives after a two-year effort led by researchers from Seoul National University. The seventeen-second silent film shows seven Korean women enslaved in China’s Yunnan Province in 1944, being interrogated by a Chinese officer following Japan’s retreat from the area.

The women stand in a row, hair pulled back, wearing shift dresses and wraps and holding onto themselves or each other for support. Young Chinese soldiers peer into the frame, smiling for the camera, but the women look down, except for one who briefly answers the officer’s questions. Several glance warily at the filmmaker, as if suspicious of the further uses of their bodies. One woman stares directly at the camera. Years later, her gaze still accuses.

Like the woman in the film, survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery — known in Korea as halmoni, or “grandmother” — have, since the 1990s, insisted on their right to accuse, to tell, and to be heard. In what is now the longest running weekly protest rally in world history, halmoni and their supporters are still demanding a full reckoning of the numerous state and military institutions that physically abused women and repressed or misdirected their stories.