Exposing 27 million dirty secrets

Exposing 27 million dirty secrets
Modern slave trade topic of movie at NCC


January 23, 2009
By TIM WALDORF twaldorf@scn1.com

In the 1800s, slaves shipped from Africa to North America cost their eventual owners the modern-day equivalent of $24,000 to $40,000.

These days, you can just go to Haiti and buy a child for $300, and you can use that child for whatever you want.
Justin Dillon, maker of the documentary "Call+ Response," talks with North Central College students on Thursday. The movie will be shown there tonight.
Terence Guider-Shaw / For the Sun

If you go
What: North Central College is screening the anti-slavery film "Call+Response."
When: 7 p.m. tonight.
Where: Thrust Theatre at Meiley-Swallow Hall, 31 S. Ellsworth St.
Cost: $8 per person at the door. For more information: Visit www.nccunion.com or contact Jeremy Gudauskas at 630-637-5417.

"The reality is that we've become more expendable. That doesn't sound like progress to me," Justin Dillon, director of the documentary "Call+Response," said to a small group of North Central College students who gathered at Meiley-
Swallow Hall to meet him and get a sneak peek of the anti-slavery film the school will review tonight.

Dillon, a singer-songewriter from California, spent the past few years making the documentary, which he released last fall without advertising or the backing of any major studio.

The film, according to its Web site, www.callandresponse.com, "reveals the world's 27 million dirtiest secrets," those being the 27 million throughout the world who are slaves today.

Half of them are in the sex trade, and half of them are children, said Dillon.

Eighty percent of them are female, like the young girl he met while performing in a remote Russian village. The girl was prepared to pay $2,400 to come to America and work at a McDonald's in Cleveland for nothing -- no money at all. She was not prepared for what would likely have befallen her. Dillon said there was a 95 percent chance she would have landed at JFK airport, her passport would have been taken and she would have been thrown in a brothel.

"We explained that to her and to her friends, and that was hard" Dillon said. "But I'll tell you what was even harder: the fact that they just didn't want to believe, that they'd rather take a chance -- a 5 percent chance -- to get out of where they were because life was so bad where they were.

"They were just such easy prey," he continued. "It is easier for them to just go ahead and take the chance and hope for the best. It is in that side of vulnerability, that side of systemic poverty, that we find human trafficking and slavery alive."

In "Call+Response," Dillon and a whole host of volunteers dedicated to the "21st Century Abolitionist Movement," go undercover to capture that dynamic; to show how slavery is thriving, from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India.

To show how slave traders made more than $32 billion in 2007; more money earned than Google, Nike and Starbuck's, combined.

But the film also promotes a solution in what Dillon calls "open source activism." He explained it as a grassroots movement to stop these human rights violations that would take hold because people who care about the issue decided to use their talents and gifts, whatever they may be, to get more and more people behind the cause.

"What is great about living in this time is that things can happen really, really fast," Dillon said. "We can do amazing things, but we have to stay the course."

The film even breaks down the "fourth wall" and asks viewers to take out their cellphones and send donations to organizations battling slavery and human trafficking. And its Web site, www.callandresponse.com, lists numerous other ways those who are compelled to help can do so.

"It really comes down to us," said Dillon.

The views expressed in these blog posts are those of the author and not of the Sun-Times News Group.




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