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48:00American Call-Girl is an undercover investigation into the escort industry in Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal on paper but alive and well in practice, with the industry making use of clever ways for the John to “read between the lines” while everyone else turns a blind eye. With the Internet the backbone of the 21st century sex industry, thousands of escort websites are carefully worded, but if you look closely, many appear to clearly sell sex in a fiercely competitive ‘market.’ American Call-Girl goes behind the scenes to meet escorts and see what life is really like for them. What is exposed along the way, is the rampant and abusive underworld where supposedly independent girls are actually made beholden to pimps by way of violence, extortion and trafficking. Others fight for the freedom to simply work, being on top of their own marketing and advertising. The escort industry thrives in cities throughout the United States, but Las Vegas is a ground zero, a thriving black market.
1:23:21Amidst the supposed growing prosperity of India, there remains a dark underbelly of poverty. Born Into Brothels chronicles this through the lens of Kolkata’s red light district where film-maker Zana Briski inspires a group of children of the prostitutes of the area to photograph the most reluctant subjects of it. As the kids excel in their new found art, will this help them have a chance for a better life away from the miserable poverty that threatens to crush their dreams?
58:25Child Sex Trade USA travels through the United States to reveal the workings of a pervasive child sex trade, discovering that it is just as easy to ‘buy a child’ in the US as it is in Asia. 300,000 American children have been forced in to the sex industry, as of 2009, in the United States alone. This film presents a much needed analysis of the shocking cultural values that surround child abuse, paedophilia, human trafficking and prostitution; asking big questions of how, why, and what to do about it…
1:17:19Girl Model offers a glimpse into the hall of mirrors that is the modelling world as it interfaces with other industries and other countries. The film follows Ashley—a deeply ambivalent former-model who is now a scout and scours the Siberian countryside looking for ‘fresh faces’ to send to the Japanese market; and one of her ‘discoveries,’ Nadya, a thirteen year-old plucked from the Siberian countryside and dropped into the centre of Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. What entails is the opening of a can of worms that isn’t easily solved in one sitting—a thriving and curiously sinister modelling industry that spans the globe, luring everywhere with pretences of wonder, success and riches. But the realities are harsh. The fashion industry can look glamorous from the outside, but its insides are, at the very least, deceptive and sinister; and the myths run deeply entrenched in the culture, constantly promulgating new, young recruits. This ‘meat market,’ a prelude to sex trafficking, is creepy, ugly, and preys on the young and vulnerable. Can the spell be broken?
31:44With its tropical beaches and buzzing nightlife, the island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand attracts many hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. The island is renowned in the West for sex tourism, and every year many male tourists form relationships with women working in the bars of Koh Samui. But how does this work? And what dynamics are at play? Love Me Long Time is a film that speaks to the men that travel back and forth to Thailand for these holiday romances that are for sale in a country ravaged by the oppression of the west, human trafficking and prostitution driven by poverty. Do these men know what they’re doing?
1:16:30As nations around the globe attempt to fight sex trafficking, many consider legalising prostitution. Two filmmakers travel across ten countries to explore the issue, attempting to answer the question: “How can we prevent sexual exploitation before it happens in the first place?” Though governments are getting better at prosecuting traffickers and providing aftercare to victims, it is time we begin to ask the question of what lies at the root.
16:41Using undercover filming, Sex and Survival in Madagascar exposes the booming child sex trade of the 21st Century. In the hub of Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries, prostitution is rampant and seen as an unavoidable means of survival. The film shows the complicity and complacency of authorities that do not act to stop this terror, and so the acts of resistance against sex slavery are carried out by the children themselves.
Far from ending with the abolition of slavery, the trade in human beings is thriving more than ever before. Today, 27 million men, women and children are held, sold and trafficked as slaves throughout the world. From the sex slaves of Eastern Europe to China’s prison labour slaves; from Brazil’s hellish charcoal slave camps to entire families enslaved in Pakistan’s brick kilns, this series exposes the people behind modern slavery and the companies who profit from it.
54:59The Virgin Trade investigates the growing phenomenon of Western sex tourism, with a focus on Thailand. The film travels through red light districts and the starry-eyed advertising propaganda that targets Western men to reveal the mechanics of the sex industry as it operates throughout Asia. What is revealed is a world entangled by money which leads to abuse, demand which perpetuates the culture, consumerism which drives demand, and poverty which drives the need. What happens when countries and cultures are ravished like this with Western sex tourism? Are parents selling their children into brothels to finance lavish Western lifestyles? Or do orphans fill the demand—smuggled into prostitution after disasters like the tsunami of 2004? The Virgin Trade dangles the questions of numbers while still affirming widespread exploitation and deceit. The interconnectedness, scale and depth of the problem, as well as what is still hidden or left unsaid, is left up to the viewer…
Trafficked
Trafficked is a set of two films that follow a former-police officer’s quest to find the man who enslaved a young Thai girl in a Sydney brothel. The series explores the trafficking of women and children for prostitution as a global problem. The United Nations estimates that more than one million children are forced into sexual slavery each year. Some of them are trafficked into Australia.
1:59:25In a visual exploration of institutionalised prostitution, Whores’ Glory travels the globe to show how these people really live and work today, across three economically divergent countries. In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients inside a brightly-lit glass box. In the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam trafficker haggles over the price of a teenage girl. On the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addictions run high while women pray to ‘Lady Death.’ Whores’ Glory is a unobscured look at the realities of sex-trafficking today and the industry that continues to spawns it and keep it alive.