I’m running around all day today, but no time to wait with this post: I want to recommend Lifetime’s Human Trafficking mini-series. It aired last night (in the U.S.), but the first part will be replayed early this evening before the second part is shown.
The NYTimes quotes an immigration and customs official from the movie:
An ounce of cocaine, wholesale: $1,200, but you can only sell it once. A woman or a child, $50 to $1,000, but you can sell them each day, every day, over and over and over again. The markup is immeasurable.
The movie is well done in many ways, I recommend it.
One question I’m left with is the best ways to educate people, and especially children, about all this. A movie like this is helpful, but it’s not clear how a 12-year-old would deal with it. And then there are areas where showing such a movie is not even an option.
The NYTimes piece has a synopsis of the first part in case you can’t spend four hours on this tonight.
{ 2 comments }
carabinieri 10.26.05 at 10:02 pm
The NYTimes quotes an immigration and customs official…
that would’ve been donald sutherland :D
The movie is well done in many ways…
oh, i dunno about “well done;” cheesy, sordid and melodramatic maybe in that tv-movie-miniseries-of-the-week kinda way (and yet i have to admit oddly compelling, esp the fake e.european accents!)
all in all it suffers from message movies redux and the trouble with films that try to think, i.e. it may call attention to an issue that deserves to be more widely disseminated in the public’s collective consciousness/conscience, but i wouldn’t mistake/substitute it for actual knowledge about the situation, much less elevate it to some kind of artistic/political statement of consequence (roots?). at best i’d characterize it as an educational dramatization.
Eszter 10.27.05 at 3:07 pm
I said “from the movie”, which was referring to the character played by Donald Sutherland, whose name I could not recall and info that didn’t seem particularly relevant. Perhaps it was not clear that I was referring to a fictional character, but given that it’s not a documentary I figured people would understand.
It’s fine to critique, but it would be more helpful if you could point to alternatives that you think do a better job.
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