Engaging through the Chicago Social Change Film Festival

I attended the Chicago Social Change Film Festival at Icon Theater to watch a film called SOLD from India. It was adapted from a novel by Patricia McCormick. It was very much a movie, not a documentary, which I think was valuable because documentaries can give viewers an intellectualized distance instead of an emotional response. The movie begins with a 12-year-old girl named Lakshmi from Nepal. She truly lives in the mountains, not even a village. Her family is very poor, and though they are already surviving on the bare minimum, they need a roof that will shelter them from the heavy rains. Lakshmi’s drunken father accepts money from a woman who wants to take Lakshmi to be a maid. Unfortunately, this woman is actually recruiting Lakshmi to be a sex slave. There are awful scenes of Lakshmi being beaten, drugged, raped, starved, but the film manages to keep you interested instead of crippled with depression. Lakshmi ultimately becomes a hero, escaping and rescuing all the other girls as well as guiding the police to the dead bodies of other young slaves.

While it wasn’t a true story, the film really forced me to understand the plights of being in a situation so horrible and distant from any experience of my own.

People, myself included, often subconsciously put an intellectualized distance between themselves and a particularly horrendous cause. It almost functions as a defense mechanism because some atrocities are so unpleasant to understand and empathize with.

We were reminded by members of an organization in Chicago, called TraffickFree, that sexual exploitation and human trafficking is not only an overseas issue. They estimate that over 24,000 woman are CURRENTLY being trafficked in Chicago. It was interesting for me because I actually knew that number was feasible, I knew that human slavery is an issue in America, but I more or less forgot about it. To me, slavery going on nearby was so hard to imagine that my brain hadn’t even incorporated it into my worldview.

SOLD, was a fantastic start to the year of Civic Engagement because I could actually engage. I’m really glad I saw it, and hope to learn more about human trafficking in the Chicago area.