Posts by Kat Rohrer
Fatal Promises Premiers in NYC
Published September 14, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT
Kat Rohrer, co-producer of the new film about human trafficking Fatal Promises, discusses her film which premiers in New York this week.
New York is America’s biggest port of entry for human trafficking. So it is crucial that our film Fatal Promises film premieres in New York City at the heart of the crisis. Fatal Promises, four dedicated years in the making, is now finished and premiering from the 16th to 24th September.
We found out about human trafficking thanks to a single news item in the New York Times about people being bought, transported across borders, sold and re-sold and, finally, discarded. Humans as commodities? Not in the developed democracies, not in this modern age, surely! After some research we felt compelled. The stories of victims have to be told and documented, public awareness must be raised. How can we, as a conscientious society, tolerate slavery in 21st century?
The survivors we met are truly remarkable people who have been through ordeals we could not even imagine. It is their voices and their anger that we want the public to hear in this film -- stories like Katja’s, an ambitious Ukrainian who was promised a summer job on America’s east coast but landed in a strip club in the Midwest. Or that of 18-year-old sailor cadet Eugene, who was promised good money crab fishing off the Russian coastline, but was in fact starved and abused on an unmarked ship.
As activist Gloria Steinem says in Fatal Promises,
The stories of the victims have to be told – not just the bare facts and numbers like human trafficking being a billion-dollar-business.
We remain stunned by the fact that, despite all the endless conferences and proclamations to end modern day slavery, the trade has been growing steadily since we started the work on the documentary in 2005. Activist and Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson was so right in 2008 at the million-dollar Vienna Forum of the UNODC when she condemned the "karaoke for the concerned“ in an interview for Fatal Promises, and asked "What is the point of us all traveling to Vienna when we don’t have a plan?"
The title of the documentary not only refers to the promises made to potential victims which, for many, turned out to be fatal. It also refers to the empty promises made by governments and organizations like the UN which vow to abolish modern day slavery but lack the political will to act.
Fatal Promises is playing at Cinema Village, E 12th St, New York, NY, 10003 from 16 – 24 September 2009.
Photo credit: epredator
