Directed by Christian Duguay and written by Carol Doyle and Agatha Dominik, the 2005 Canadian movie Human Trafficking starred Mira Sorvino, Donald Sutherland, Robert Carlyle, Remy Girard, Michael Sorvino, and other actors. This movie was filmed in Montreal, Bangkok, and Prague.
Women and girls are unknowingly lured or abducted for the human trafficking industry. There are large networks of crime organizations and international sex rings located all over the world that seek young women and children as sex slaves. These organizations pose as fake modeling agencies or dating services to lure hopeless and poor people, promising endless opportunities for money, fame, love, and a better life. Young girls want to become models, mostly to travel and make money, while struggling young women are seeking to make money or find a husband.
Children are photographed for sex slave porn and underground child modeling photos, but they are tricked into believing that they can become rich and famous models. Poor families often sell their kids to traffickers because they have too many kids they cannot feed.
Victims are picked up from the airport and transported via a van or truck toward the brothel. They are given sexy clothes, drugged with liquor and/or drugs, and told to undress. They are traumatized from the rape, each one experiencing constant nightmares or insomnia because of the sexual abuse. The organization has information on each girl, which includes their home address and their family, and they blackmail these women and young girls by threatening them to perform in sex work or they will harm their family members. There are also young boys in the kids’ group. Young boys are sent to recruit kids by befriending them in order for traffickers can easily abduct these kids.
In Kiev, Ukraine, a young girl runs away from home to pursue modeling opportunities from some scouting event that her and her friend had attended. The girl’s father asks her friend about his daughter’s whereabouts, and she eventually tells him about the event. Meanwhile, the young girl is taken to a mansion with other women, each dressed in sexy clothes, and men are handling them. She runs away, but she isn’t able to escape. An adult Czech woman, Helena, is threatened with harming her daughter if she doesn’t cooperate or if she exposes anything. Samantha Gray works with police to find her abducted young daughter, Annie. Her husband returned home, while she remains in the Philippines, searching for her daughter. ICE raids a building, seeking traffickers.
Helena disappears, and she goes to the police, telling Kate about the traffickers. Sergei asks his organization to go after Helena’s daughter, Ivanka, who is staying with Helena’s aunt. But Ivanka and her aunt receive a phone call, just in time, and they escape outside, where a police car arrives to take them somewhere safe. Helena is with the police, but she is afraid to talk until her daughter is near her. Helena tells Kate about the Ukrainian girl, Nadia, whom she befriended. Kate sees Sergei threatening his lawyer. She continues interrogating Helena about the traffickers. The Ukrainian father, Viktor, talks to different people to help him find his daughter. He goes to the sex ring to discuss job opportunities with a corrupt Russian friend who works for the organization. He asks the man for a job with the organization. The man tells him, if he is hired, his first job is in Mexico City.
Sergei has a master’s degree as well as a modelling agency and dating service, which makes him appear as a legitimate professional businessman. Helena starts talking to Kate, telling her about transportation vehicles. Kate takes Helena to a house for her safety and warns Helena not to go outside. While peeking outside a door window, Helena notices something. She steps outside, and someone shoots her in the head. Kate goes to her, but it is too late. When Kate picks up Ivanka and Helena’s aunt from the airport, she tells them that Helena was killed. Then, she goes to the detention center to talk to trafficked girls. Since they are all scared to talk, Kate threatens to deport them to their hometown. The Ukrainian father, Viktor, arrives in Mexico City, seeking his daughter under the guise that he works for the organisation. He watches the men handling the girls. Frustrated and hopeless with not finding her daughter, Samantha Grey plans to return home to save her marriage.
Kate works with Bill, who is Special Agent in Charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York Field Office. They know who was involved in killing Helena. They go to Homeland Security with their information. Nadia sees a photograph in the newspaper about Helena’s murder. She has a nervous breakdown, goes inside the bathroom, and swallows many pills. While one of the men is having sex with her inside a room, she suddenly runs out to throw up the pills. One of the girls is diagnosed with AIDS. Kate plans to disguise herself as a Russian mail-order bride in order to go undercover inside the brothel. Annie finds a cell phone and calls her mother. As Ellen drives Samantha to the airport, Samantha’s cell phone rings, and Samantha talks to Annie for a while. Samantha hears enough to know that a man just entered the room with Annie, and Annie cannot talk anymore. Agent Bill interrogates Sergei and his lawyer. Kate continues her computer research.
Vehicles drop off many girls in Mexico. Viktor is there, and he suddenly sees his daughter. She also sees him, but the traffickers pull her away, taking her elsewhere. Kate returns to the house where Helena was placed for her safety, and she looks out the window to notice the billboard Helena was looking at when she was shot. The billboard gives her a clue about the brothel’s location. Annie sees one of the sick girls being killed.
ICE suddenly raids the house, and Viktor runs out into the street in fear. Kate chases him with a gun, thinking he is one of the traffickers. But she lets him go after he tells her that he is seeking his daughter, Nadia. Annie’s mother, Samantha, and her friend Ellen check out Ellen’s video of a man with a young boy and an older man coming towards her before breaking her video camera. Annie’s mother notices the man’s voice sounds similar to the man she heard on her cell phone in the background. Sergei’s doctor planned a vacation in the Philippines, and he asks Sergei if he knows of any fun places there. Sergei gives him a telephone number for a brothel.
While at a bar, Viktor watches a television screen with others, and he notices his daughter is in a sex slave porn scene with a man. But she looks uncomfortable and scared. He runs out of the bar. Sergei becomes suspicious about the ICE raid, wondering who talked. He puts a hit on the older man, Tommy, because Tommy mentioned that he had broken a woman’s video recorder. Viktor asks his Russian friend to let him be with the girl named Nadia for the night, and his friend gives him this girl because he feels Viktor is attracted to her.
They go inside a room together, and she is happy to see her father. Agent Kate pretends to fly to Moscow for her undercover job as a Russian mail-order bride, Katya. Instead, she is wired up before she goes to meet Jeff Templeton. He takes her inside a van with other women, and Agent Bill and ICE follow the van. As Sergei checks out all the women, he sees Katya, and they speak Russian together. He feels suspicious because she looks too old. She states her real name before pulling out her gun to arrest him, but she cannot shoot. ICE raids the room, shooting Sergie. All the kids and women are rescued from the brothel, and passports are returned to all the victims. Viktor gives his daughter, Nadia, a gift of earrings that belonged to her late mother.
It is noted that human trafficking is the third most profitable international business, having at least 800,000 sex-slave victims per year. Moreover, the late Aviccii exposed child trafficking and pedophilia in his music video before his untimely death at 28.
The full movie can be watched on YouTube for free.
