|
“Sacrifice”
- The Story of
Child Prostitutes from Burma
A talk
and documentary film
presentation by Laurie Maund,
and Hseng Noung of the Shan Women's
Action Network
(SWAN)
Present:
Michael Berbae,
Caroline Marsh, Lara Johnson, Voravit Suwanianichkij, Annette
Kunigagon, David
Steane, Leon Noordermeer, John Cadet, Horst Schneider, Pallop
Changkaochai, Ben
Svasti, Santiphap Inkong-ngam, Chaiya Assawapisanboon, Bernard D.
Davis, Dale
& Judy Harcourt, Gert Slambrouck, Guy Cardinal, Jim Campion, Surat
Jinnarat, Christine Chabot, Lamar & Chongchit Robert, Megan Hansen,
Andrea
Ziffer, Michael Tuckson, Ralph Kramer, Matthew & Roxanne Oddie,
Klaus
Berkmüller, Adrian Pieper, Victoria Vorreiter, Masimba Biriwasha,
Elyse Myers,
John Dore, Simone Buys, Leonard Fong, Karis Pratt, Chris Sinclair, Thai
Nguyen,
Duane Nelson, Tawee Donchai, Baralee Meesukh, Hans Baumann, John Butt,
Monika
& Hanna & Heinz Brandli, Susan Paquin, Kamal Hamdy, Mark Steel,
Kanokwan
Cadet, Stefan & Tina Mickel, Christa Crawford, Alex Brodard, Chris
Shier,
57 Reinhard Hohler, Liz & Beverley Kalnin, Margaret & Harry
Deelman,
Matta Nan Drakwang, Joyce Matchett, Ronalyn Lavin, Sharon Downing, Rex
Burington, Peter Gore-Symes, Marei Burrows, Ronnie Lavin, Amaralak
Khamhong,
Bodil Blokker. An audience of at least
85.
“Sacrifice”
(1998) is a
50-minute documentary produced and directed by Ellen Bruno.
Each year thousands of young girls are
recruited from rural
Burmese villages to work in the sex industry in neighboring Thailand.
Held
for years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme
abuse
by pimps, clients, and the police.
The trafficking of Burmese girls has soared in recent years as a direct
result
of political repression in Burma.
Human rights abuses, war and ethnic discrimination has displaced
hundreds of
thousands of families, leaving families with no means of livelihood. An
offer
of employment in Thailand
is a rare chance for many families to escape extreme poverty.
Sacrifice examines the social, cultural, and
economic forces at work in
the trafficking of Burmese girls into prostitution in Thailand.
It is
the story of the valuation and sale of human beings, and the efforts of
teenage
girls to survive a personal crisis born of economic and political
repression.
Awards
Gold
Apple
National Educational Film Festival
Grand
Prize
Religion Today Film Festival,
Italy
Golden
Spire Award
San Francisco
International Film Festival
Documentary
Film Competition
Sundance Film Festival
Jury
Award
Charlotte Film Festival
Reviews
These reviews
reflect the
compassion and empathy with which the film was made, and the impact of
“Sacrifice” on those who watch it.
"Sacrifice
counterpoints forthright tales of four young
prostitutes with mesmerizing images: a woman standing in a door frame
awaiting
her fate juxtaposed with farmers cultivating the fields. The images
make a
poignant plea for survival, both of the exiled women and the tormented
land."
— Andrea Alsberg,
Sundance Film
Festival
"Sacrifice offers a view of the terrible odds faced by women
born
into poverty where the only commodity for sale are their bodies. These
are
complicated stories that get beneath tabloid headlines to capture, with
great
visual invention, the dignity and damaged nobility of young Burmese
victims.
The lives of these women are revealed to be the stuff of fairy
tale…the magic goes bad and the witch, the ogre, and the monster
win the day
in this
chilling view of sexual exploitation…one we have never seen
before."
— B. Ruby Rich, San
Francisco Bay
Guardian
"Compelling interviews and beautiful photography create a complex
portrait
of economic conditions in Burma, and the impact this has on families,
rural
villages and the young women themselves."
— San Francisco
International Film
Festival
" Unflinching in its account of abuse and corruption, SACRIFICE
derives much of its power from the testimonies of four girls, who speak
directly to viewers with a painful directness beyond their young years.
Bruno
demonstrates an exceptional ability for conveying the complex facts and
emotional upheaval of globally relevant true stories. In the sobering
yet
poetic Sacrifice, Bruno presents the terribly moving
first-person
accounts of four young girls from Burma
who were virtually kidnapped from their homes and forced into a life of
prostitution in Thailand.
As with all her films, Bruno approaches difficult issues with the
intent of
uncovering hard truths and giving voice to people who are too often
marginalized or misrepresented by mainstream media."
— Steven Jenkins,
FILM/TAPE WORLD
"Sacrifice illuminates a difficult subject of major social
consequence with integrity and objective attachment. Told with delicate
simplicity, Sacrifice paints a picture of an unfamiliar reality
that is,
by turns, unbelievably ugly and startlingly beautiful. The
heartbreakingly
eloquent words of the girls lead viewers into a society whose mores are
almost
completely alien to our own."
— Laurence Vittes, The Hollywood Reporter
Laurie Maund introduced the
film and
Laurie and Hseng Noung
conducted the question and answer session after the film. Such was the
interest
in the film’s content, and the size of the audience, that the
question and
answer session had to be brought to a close just before 10
o’clock. It
continued over drinks in the Alliance Cafeteria.
In view of the number of people who
arrived at the Alliance
just after 7.30
and couldn’t physically get into the room to see the film; people
were already
sitting on the floor centimetres away from the screen, we are going to
organise another showing of the film as soon as arrangements can be
made.
Profiles
Ellen Bruno
Filmmaker and
international relief worker Ellen Bruno has spent much of the last 20
years in Southeast Asia. She began
her relief efforts more than 25
years ago in Mexico,
working in remote Mayan villages. Since then she has worked in refugee
camps on
the Thai-Cambodian border, as field coordinator for the International
Rescue
Committee, she served for four years as director of the Cambodian
Women's
Project for the American Friends Service Committee. She has been a
hospice
worker for the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, providing bedside
assistance for people
dying of AIDS and cancer.
Ellen completed a Master’s degree in documentary film at Stanford University
in 1990. Her first film SAMSARA,
her Master’s thesis at Stanford, documents Cambodian life in the
aftermath of
Pol Pot's killing fields. SATYA:
A PRAYER FOR THE ENEMY is based on the experiences of young Tibetan
Buddhist nuns who have been imprisoned and tortured for their
nonviolent
protests of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. SACRIFICE is the
final
installment in her Asian trilogy. All three films premiered at the
Sundance
Film Festival.
Ellen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998, a Rockefeller
Fellowship in
1997, fellowships from the Western States Media Arts and a Shenkin
Fellowship
from Yale University School of Art.
Ellen Bruno’s
website: www.brunofilms.com
Hseng Noung – Co-director of
“Sacrifice”
Hseng Noung was born
in Hsipaw, Shan State
in Burma.
Demoralised by the political situation in that country, she joined the
Shan
underground movement in 1977. She spent six years with the Shan
movement before
she came to live with her husband in Thailand.
She has worked as a
freelance photographer since 1983. In December 1995, she became one of
six
human rights monitors from around the world to be honoured by Human
Rights
Watch for her work in helping girls and young women from Burma lured
into the
sex trade in Thailand, and in exposing the networks behind this
deplorable
trade in human beings.
On March 28th 1999, Hseng Noung together with 40 Shan women
founded
the Shan Women's Action Network.
She is currently an
advisory team member of the Shan Women's Action Network and is also a
Presidium
Board Member of the Women's League of Burma (WLB), which was
established on
December 9th 1999 and comprises 12 women’s
organizations.
Website: www.shanwomen.org
Lawrence
Maund – Translator on “Sacrifice”
Lawrence Maund was
born in Australia. He read about Buddhism from a young age, and
by his early twenties he was practicing the faith. In 1972, he left Australia
to
make a pilgrimage to the sacred places of Buddhism. While in Thailand
he
ordained as a monk in a rural area of Isaan. There, he learned to speak
Thai
fluently and taught himself to read and write the language.
He was a monk for two
years, and
then he left Thailand
and
went to Nalanda
University
to study for four years. In
1979 he returned to Thailand
and worked at the Buddhist University in Bangkok.
On a subsequent visit to Australia,
he took the international examinations and achieved United Nations
accreditation in translation and interpretation. Returning to Thailand he worked at Chiang Mai University
teaching language translation
courses and developing a master’s level translation curriculum.
In the course
of his work as a translator Laurie began to see HIV-related information
–
statistics, research, education and prevention. That was when he knew
that there
was a problem in the way international organizations were trying to
treat
HIV-related issues in Thailand.
They were going through the medical establishment when they should have
been
going through the monks and monasteries to utilize their role in Thai
culture.
It was while he was a
volunteer
teacher at Mahamakut
Buddhist University
at Wat Chedi Luang that the basic idea of the Sangha Metta Project was
born.
After two years spent refining the proposal, he finally presented it to
UNICEF,
and it was born as a pilot project.
The Sangha Metta
Project is a model
of community care. The monks are educated about HIV, and in turn
educate the
community. They provide information and care from infection to
symptomatic HIV
to full-blown AIDS and finally death. And because the state of a
person’s mind
is so important at the moment of death, they do all that they can do to
make
death peaceful. Many hospitals in every Buddhist country in Southeast Asia now work with the Sangha Metta
Project, and it has been
recognized by organizations all over the world. It has trained over
5,000
people, and developed many additional programs. As Director of the
Sangha Metta
Project, Laurence has traveled the world, sharing his knowledge and
experiences. He met with the Global Health Council and Faith in Action.
His
model of care now crosses religious barriers and has become interfaith
in many
parts of the world.
Website: www.buddhanet.net/sangha-metta/project.html
|
