ABOUT
an autobiography
of child murder
and rape
Robert Mitchell
ABOUT
To find a word, phrase or topic in the movie, download this PDF searchable transcript.
Speechess, an illustrated docu-bio-pic still film, is Robert Mitchell’s story of growing up in a family where extreme physical and sexual abuse were the norm: starting from when he was a toddler, until a police officer found him when he was 17 nearly beaten to death on Christmas Eve. The above photo is is the only known picture from Robert's childhood, and it was taken several months before his final beating on Christmas Eve.
After completing decades of therapeutic healing, Robert published the book by the same title in 2018. Later that same year, Aven recorded the vocal tracks for the audio-book version which was published in, but later retracted by Robert from, Amazon’s audio-book catalog, due to Amazon’s pricing scheme which effectively just gave the audio-book away for free.
Though Robert considered a movie version of the book from the get-go, due to the age of the children involved in the story, he realized that it would be both unethical and illegal to make a motion picture that was true to the book. That all changed when he saw the 2019 movie REWIND about Sasha Joseph Neulinger and the abuse he survived as a child. In it, a therapist had Sasha draw stick figures to depict what he endured. And that is when Robert realized that he could tell his story as a narrated still film using the same kind of stick figures.
With that epiphany, Robert began working with Tyshay in 2023 to create stick figure pictures to illustrate the vocals which Aven had recorded in 2018. Consisting of some 1,600 drawings, the movie was completed in 2024 with Robert producing, screenwriting and editing it.
Speechless seeks a wide audience to increase awareness of childhood abuse and to help others tell their own survival stories. To that end, though the book and the movie narration both discuss acts of physical and sexual abuse, there are no visual depictions of nudity, sex acts, or pornography in this film.
in telling our stories
the healing begins
info@speechless.film