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Victims of sexual crimes and #MeToo harassment have, on multiple fronts, seen setbacks in the US in recent months.

The movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is now looking at a third trial on sexual assault charges after previous cases delivered mixed results for his victims. A high-profile case of federal racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking against the rapper Sean Combs returned a verdict only on lesser charges.

At the same time, some men accused of sexual misconduct or harassment have made their way back toward the spotlight – Donald Trump is in the White House, comedian Louis CK is headlining a national tour, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is running for New York City mayor.

For Kaja Sokola, Weinstein’s youngest sexual assault accuser, it is a tough moment to speak out as a victim.

“I believe they are a setback for #MeToo, and I believe that it is very important right now for people to speak out,” she told the Guardian. “For people that are being abused, the most important message I can send is that you don’t have to go to court to get justice – but you need to talk to other people.”

Sokola knows about disappointment in the face of US justice. She says Weinstein raped her twice, in 2002 when she was 16, and in 2006 when she was 19. At trial in June, Sokola, now 39, testified about the alleged 2006 rape. Sokola testified that she had gone with her older sister to a meeting with Weinstein when he took her to hotel and raped her.

The jury found that the charge relating to Sokola’s claim had not met the burden of proof required for conviction. But the jury found Weinstein guilty of raping accuser Miriam Haley and were hung on a charge relating to accuser Jessica Mann – the charge that may now be retried.

After Weinstein was found not guilty on the Sokola charge in June, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg apologized to Sokola for the verdict and thanked her for her bravery.

“Without the courage of survivors like you, prosecutors like us cannot pursue accountability and justice,” he said. He added that the case was “about an immense power imbalance”.

Sokola has had time to consider the events of that time. Her sister had turned over to the defense personal writings from a spell in rehab when Sokola was treated for alcoholism and bulimia that did not mention the alleged Weinstein rape among a list of men that had abused her. The sisters are not on speaking terms. “No, and I will not [speak to her],” she said.

“I was terrified that Harvey’s lawyers could crush me, so that’s why I didn’t write about it.” A former friend had also testified that Sokola and Weinstein had been together earlier, throwing off the timeline of her account.

“The trial, from what I understand, was more about proving the point that people who thought they were untouchable are not untouchable,” Sokola said. “I’m pleased that I came forward for people to hear my story, and prosecutors decided that it was a case. The jurors are a whole different story.”

She said she identifies with Cassie Ventura, who testified at length in the Sean Combs case. Sokola too had been in a long, abusive relationship. In Sokola’s case, that became a custody battle with her husband of seven years that a US court found had subjected her to “severe, unrelenting psychological and physical abuse”.

“I really connected with Cassie’s story, because I think people don’t really understand right now how difficult it is to step out of a relationship that’s abusive,” she said. “That’s why I have so much empathy for Cassie. I met Harvey when I was 16; she met Sean when she was 19. We were just kids.”

The picture Sokola paints of young women like her coming to the US at the time is in keeping with stories of that era in the 2000s. The fashion industry wanted to cast eastern European and Brazilian models, and model agencies readily delivered.

“I was definitely the type for that. But I think sending a 16-year-old to cities like this is inappropriate.”

What she found was not necessarily what she anticipated. Models would be encouraged to go nightclubs by promoters who were often also models. Two New York nightclubs of the time, Seraphina and Butter, were mentioned at trial.

“Everyone knew about what was going on. It was not a secret. The first time I went out for dinner, at Seraphina, I was like, ‘Oh my God, someone is paying for my dinner. They’re so generous. How lucky!’ It was only later that I understood the trade and I changed my perspective.”

“The [modelling] agencies are like pimps for rich people,” Sokola now considers.

Weinstein, who denies the allegations against him, is currently in jail on Rikers Island in New York, and faces sentencing on 30 September on the Miriam Haley conviction, which could add 10 years to the 16-year sentence he received from a separate sexual assault conviction in California. But the New York sentencing will only happen if there is no retrial on the Jessica Mann rape charge.

Weinstein’s defense team told the Guardian their client is not willing to plead guilty to raping Mann to avoid a fourth trial.

“At some point this becomes a little too much,” said Weinstein crisis PR Juda Engelmayer. “The prosecution had a hard time making their case last time, and they’ll have a hard time the next time around. Harvey is more than ready for his next day in court.”

But Sokola’s part is done – she can’t be called again to tell her story in court. And she has come to terms with that.

“He’s probably going to die in jail. I’m not 16 any more. I’m 39, and I can stand my own ground. I think I’m good with whatever it is right now. It was like the closing of a chapter.”

“The ghost of Alfred Hitchcock was undeniably present during the making of this film,” says a note in the closing credits of Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest artisanal documentary. For once, though, the film’s subject has nothing but affection for the late master of suspense, clearly having fared better than Tippi Hedren did in the pantheon of Hitchcock blondes. Indeed, the 92-year-old sees their one and only collaboration — on 1958’s celebrated thriller Vertigo — as the highlight of her movie career, which opened with a bang and ended with a slow fade after she willfully absented herself from Hollywood (she now lives in Oregon).

Philippe tells that story in a roundabout way; like some of his previous films (Chain Reaction, Lynch/Oz or Memory: The Origins of Alien), Kim Novak’s Vertigo is all about subtext and nuance as opposed to any kind of objective truth. Towards the end of the film, Novak decides that she has lived “a big, beautiful circle”, and this is the approach Philippe has embarked on, taking no small inspiration from Vertigo’s unforgettable title sequence and the hypnotic, almost psychedelic spirals devised by graphic designer Saul Bass.

In this respect, the title has a double meaning, the more literal interpretation being Novak’s uneasiness with life at the top. Not only does she recoil at the thought of ever having been a movie star, she even refutes the word actor, claiming to have been more of a re-actor, like her Vertigo co-star James Stewart, whose toes come under special scrutiny in a clip from their second 1958 pairing, Bell, Book and Candle. In fact, the Hollywood years are recalled with something approaching horror; having stumbled into acting after a brief stint modelling for a refrigerator company, the Chicago-born Novak soon found herself under contract to Columbia Pictures and its notoriously controlling head Harry Cohn, who called her “the fat Polack” and made her change her first name from Marilyn to Kim.

This particular experience is at the very heart of Philippe’s film and leads us to the other meaning of the film’s title. Though it is ostensibly a thriller about a very elaborate murder plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is actually a study of obsession in which Novak effectively plays two roles: the mousey brunette Judy and the ice-cool blonde Madeleine. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to see how this relates to Novak’s own insecurities — “I was Marilyn Novak from nowhere,” she says — and her feelings of impostor syndrome. It also rather brilliantly illustrates her frustrations with Hollywood, a town she talks so much about leaving that it’s easy to forget her movie career lasted nearly 40 years.

“I had to get reborn,” she says, and running through the film — alongside clips from her mostly underrated performances in the likes of The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Pal Joey (1957), Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), and the delirious, almost Fassbinder-esque Hollywood drama The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) — is her ethereal artwork, which she paints with her left hand. Hitch’s influence can be seen here too, in the circles and spirals that fill the frame, although the director — inserting himself into his own story, which might be a first for Philippe — points out that her romantic depictions of birds, and bluebirds in particular, is distinctly at odds with Hitchcock’s famously dim view of them.

The climax of the film, if it can be called that, comes when Philippe discovers the iconic gray suit that Novak wears in Vertigo when she’s playing Judy, who’s pretending to be Madeleine. The emotion Novak shows is a lot, especially considering it’s just been sitting in a box upstairs the whole time and it hasn’t taken any special effort to find it. It does, however, take her spinning back in time, to a brief but clearly momentous period in her early 20s, and her power of recall is truly remarkable, not even just for her age. “My body was in this, and my body and soul were in it too,” she marvels, and it immediately takes on the significance of a sacred relic. (Does she try it on? Spoiler: She does not.)

Chances are, the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock was also in the house when Philippe’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where he debuted Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). Hitch would undoubtedly approve, because Kim Novak’s Vertigo only adds to the mystique of one of his many masterpieces, augmenting its many layers of mystery without seeking to explain and thus destroy them. More importantly, it gives Novak an excuse (she humbly calls it “permission”) to look back on her life and give us her side of the story — unapologetic and, right from the start, impressively unfiltered.

Title: Kim Novak’s Vertigo
Festival: Sundance (Out of Competition – Non-Fiction)
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe
Distributor: Dogwoof
Running time: 1 hr 16 mins