20%

20% came from a place of frustration with how trauma is processed, categorized, and reduced by institutions that are supposed to provide justice. The film explores what happens when people are told to move on from something emotionally irreversible simply because the legal system considers the punishment “enough.” I was interested in the quiet emotional aftermath of violence just as much as the violence itself, the awkward dinners, fractured friendships, forced smiles, and the way grief settles into everyday life.
I wanted the film to feel intimate and grounded rather than sensationalized. Most of the tension comes from conversation, silence, and emotional repression instead of spectacle. The story asks difficult questions about revenge, accountability, and whether justice can ever truly heal trauma, especially when the people left behind feel abandoned by the system meant to protect them.
At its core, 20% is about ordinary people pushed to an unbearable emotional breaking point. My goal was to create a morally uncomfortable thriller where the audience constantly shifts between empathy and horror, forcing them to confront how easily pain can turn into justification.
-Jonathan Ruggiero

More than 10 million people experience a violent assault each year in America. And on January 25, 2025, I became one of them, when my grandmother's much younger boyfriend decided to take a baseball bat to my skull 4 times. After knocking me unconscious, he continued the assault against my mother, striking her in the head with the same bat that he told her he had killed me with, and holding a machete to her throat. Somehow, though, after hearing the voice of my long deceased cousin, Brad, telling me to get up, I woke up, and despite my legs being paralyzed and my thumb being broken, I pulled myself across the floor to get to my phone and called 911. According to the trauma center staff, I shouldn't have survived. 1 in 4 blunt force traumas to the head can cause cerebral hemorrhage, paralysis, coma, and even death. I defied the odds, and somehow I survived.

But the most humiliating and painful process was only just beginning.

After over a year of court dates, conversations, mediation, and begging for my voice to be heard, my case against the man who had previously assaulted my mom and ruptured her ACL was all but dismissed. The man who forever altered my life and left me with a permanent Traumatic Brain Injury, was given 5 years of probation after serving a few months on home incarceration. He served 20% of 5 years because it was classified as non domestic. He never saw the inside of a prison cell for attempting to murder me and my mom. And their reasoning? I shouldn't have come home that night, and I shouldn't have maced him defensively. Their narrative was that he was defending himself from an unarmed, much smaller woman, in her own home, by repeatedly hitting her in the head intentionally. And this is without mentioning the fact that the prosecutor mocked me and repeatedly asserted that my story was false and that I didn't almost die that night. Time and again, I was reminded that this was “affecting his liberty.” But where was my liberty when he was beating me in the head with a baseball bat?

Violence doesn't just affect intimate partners or children. It can strike anywhere, at any time. But the worst part about these violent assaults is the fact that the United States system is so irretrievably broken that it often frames the victim as being at fault, and lets the assailant carry on with their life after leaving someone else's forever changed.

That's where this film came from. I took all of the feelings swirling in my head, from anger and disgust, to rage and outright volatility, combined with apathy for my permanent TBI and depression as to why I even survived in the first place, and I poured them all into a few pages of script. Those pages became 20%, brought to life by the super talented and amazing Jonathan Ruggiero, and the film stands as a testament to the injustice this country serves up on a silver platter for victims of violent crimes. A mother's love, lives altered forever, and a little bit of infringing on a man's liberty. Sound familiar?

20% is not only a fantastic film from start to finish, but a commentary on the very things that the US legal system regularly attempts to downplay and turn a blind eye towards, and it's our hope that, at the very least, it'll start some conversations.

Because the biggest changes start with the smallest of stories.
-Nikki Durbin