Human trafficking and the movies

This spring is an exciting time at Polaris Project and at many of our partner organizations in the anti-trafficking field because we feel that the movement against human trafficking is gaining momentum.  There’s an increasing sense that more people are becoming aware that modern-day slavery is present in our communities.  It’s great to see when people are motivated to fight against human trafficking once they learn about it.  Learn, get outraged, resolve to take action…and do something.  That’s how movements are built and sustained.

Yet despite this growing sense of excitement, I don’t want to get my hopes up too high – just yet.  Doing this as a full-time job, it’s easy to get swept away within the anti-trafficking movement in a series of meetings, trainings, conferences, research reports, and breaking cases.  Yet, the broader reality is that the majority of people in America still don’t know about the prevalence of human trafficking in today’s world.  They think that slavery is behind us as a past chapter in history.

A key first step of raising public awareness and social consciousness is still dearly needed.  This is where films come in because of their unique ability to touch people’s hearts and minds with visual images of the reality of modern-day slavery.

In the past few years, new films on the subject of human trafficking have hit theaters, film festival circuits, and college campuses.

Here are a few titles that have been released:

• Very Young Girls, a documentary playing on Showtime about girls recruited into the sex trade by traffickers in the U.S. and the efforts of an organization called Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) based in New York City.
• Holly, a powerful story of child sexual exploitation in Cambodia.
• Call and Response, an upbeat “rockumentary” featuring artists and musicians lending their voice and their talents to fighting slavery.
• Trade, a feature film starring Kevin Kline about one boy’s journey to find his sister who had been sold to a trafficking ring in the United States.
• Human Trafficking, a Lifetime movie starring Mira Sorvino and Donald Sutherland
• Dreams Die Hard – A movie created by Free the Slaves about numerous cases of forced labor in recent years in the U.S.
• Lilja-4-Ever, a Swedish film about sex trafficking released in 2003.

In the near future, a number of exciting new films will surely catapult the burgeoning anti-trafficking movement to new levels of success and impact. Playground Project is a new film about the commercial sexual exploitation of children in America that is starting to generate momentum in the festival circuit and through premieres in various cities.

One upcoming film that I’m particularly looking forward to is Bob Bilheimer’s global documentary, Not My Life.  A preview of this movie was released along with the 2008 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, and many feel that Not My Life holds great promise to replicate the success of Bob’s previous movie A Closer Walk on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.

These movies and documentaries are a good start, but the movement needs more.  We need more films to shed light on different forms of modern-day slavery, especially different types of forced labor.  We need more documentaries to make linkages between the common tricks of traffickers in so many countries throughout the world.  And we need more films so that a much broader audience hears our collective message that “Slavery Still Exists.”