I'm not only a writer, I'm also a spokesperson for the NRA.
In 1974, Meir Zarchi and his eight-year-old daughter were driving to a park when they saw a woman crawl naked out of the bushes. The woman had been raped by two men and Zarchi helped her to the police, where they had the misfortune of running into a singularly unhelpful police officer. It was this episode that inspired Zarchi to write and direct Day of the Woman. As I’ll discuss below, I think Zarchi did the subject matter justice and the film doesn’t really deserve to be labelled “exploitation”, because I don’t think that’s what he had in mind. And in its first release, it wasn’t marketed as exploitation and didn’t create any controversy; Camille Keaton won an award in Spain but it went mostly unnoticed. However, the film was re-released in 1980 as I Spit on Your Gravei and sold on the promise of exploitation nudity and violence. I think it’s this disconnect between the film itself and its marketing context that created much of the critical backlash it experienced.
