If you’re looking for an unbiased telling of comedian and self-confessed sexual harasser Louis C.K.’s fall from grace and rebirth into a men’s rights monarch, Sorry/Not Sorry is not the documentary for you. While the 90-minute film, which premieres locally at this weekend’s Double Exposure Film Festival, features interviews with C.K. enablers, supporters, and fans, it rightly focuses on the people most affected by his actions—the women he violated—and comedy’s inability to hold him accountable.

There’s no need to put “alleged” before C.K.’s crimes: He’s admitted, publicly, to them—masturbating in front of (or on the phone with) young women comedians whom he’d led to believe he was mentoring.

Co-directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, the New York Times-produced documentary is told in chapters. Viewers are quickly introduced to C.K. via clips from his original, self-deprecating stand-up about women and pitiful men. As Variety’s Alison Herman notes, C.K.’s comedy, often critical of himself and men in general, helped endear him to women audiences. Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur, who cast C.K. in the sitcom and admits to bringing him back to the show despite knowing the rumors circulating about C.K.’s behavior, speaks of C.K.’s brilliance, as do a handful of other comedians and critics. 

But, before 10 minutes pass, viewers are confronted with the accusations made by various women, C.K.’s statement—“These stories are true”—and hordes of mostly men defending his actions and declaring C.K. didn’t really do anything wrong. A clip of Matt Damon (one has to wonder why Damon was ever asked to meditate on C.K. in the first place) captures the actor saying “well, we can work with that,” in response to C.K.’s admission. “Like what the hell else are we supposed to do?” 

This is the crux of the film, and, really, the #MeToo movement. We’ve—allegedly—created a space for survivors of sexual misconduct to come forward and share their trauma, but that’s where the pavement ends. Instead of being believed, survivors, many of them women, are often discredited, attacked, or written off by the media. Meanwhile, perpetrators rarely own up to their crimes and are even more rarely held accountable. Their loved ones go on the defensive, victim-blaming or downright denying any wrongdoing. The rupture creates a near uncrossable schism that asks how do we move forward? What is an apology? Where is the line? And do we find any kind of redemption? We have no answers.

Sorry/Not Sorry spotlights two of the women victimized by C.K., Jen Kirkman and Abby Schachner, as well as another comedian and writer who tried to bring the rumors about C.K. to light, Megan Koester. It also features interviews with Noam Dworman, owner of New York’s esteemed Comedy Cellar, as well as the three Times reporters—Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley, and Jodi Kantor—who broke the C.K. story shortly after Kantor helped break the Harvey Weinstein scandal. (If only She Said had taken the documentary route and not the Hollywood limelight.) Kirkman, Schachner, and Koester share how, in one way or another, their experiences with C.K. helped derail their careers. Schachner, who says she was on the phone with C.K. in 2003 when he started asking her inappropriate questions and masturbating, became the butt of a Dave Chappelle clip, in which the ever on the wrong side of history comedian joked, “Bitch, you don’t know how to hang up a phone?”

Times reporter Buckley marks the film’s turning point when she says: “If something horrible has happened to you, why should it continue to hurt you when you bring it to light? That to me is the more interesting question and almost the more important one.”

Even against the backdrop of C.K. admitting to sexual harassment, the women were belittled, accused of “making mountains out of molehills,” as one reporter says in the film. And C.K.’s supporters come out of the woodwork, with everyone from Janeane Garofalo to Roseanne Barr coming to his defense.

Suh and Mones aren’t just looking to tell the singular story of the women C.K. harassed. Instead they’re using this as an example to undermine the belief that cancel culture is real. It’s Schur, who comes across as truly learning from his original “it’s not my problem” response to the C.K. rumors, who sums it up best: He calls “cancel culture” an “ironic term … applied to people who have flourishing careers—they’re all fine.”

There are plenty more quotable lines from Sorry/Not Sorry and enough interviews with C.K.’s current fan base outside sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden as recently as this year to make one’s blood boil. There’s also an attempt to answer the everlasting question of how we all move forward from survivors sharing their stories to perpetrators returning (or never leaving) the public eye. Is it definitive? No, but it’s a start. 

Sorry/Not Sorry screens at 8:45 p.m. on Nov. 4 at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library doubleexposure23.eventive.org. Part of Double Exposure Film Festival, which runs Nov. 2 through 5 in D.C. dxfest.com. $65–$275.

Now entering its ninth season, Double Exposure showcases the best of investigative filmmaking, combining film screenings for the public with a professional symposium for journalists and visual storytellers.