Slavery Doc Takes Musical Approach

The voice on the other end of the line was timid.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Of course not. Not at all,” I said, trying not to send her scurrying like a mouse. “I’ve just—I’ve been worried about you these last few months. Where were you?”

She paused, then: “I was working.”

“You went back to your pimp?”

“Yes. I was working.” She sounded like a little girl, much younger than her age, guessed to be about 16. “I had to pay a pretty steep price for trying to leave him before.”

This was my conversation with “Katelyn.” Five months earlier, I’d heard her story from Surrea Oglesby, an advocate for troubled girls. Katelyn had contacted Oglesby for help. She said she’d been kidnapped from Moldova at the age of 8, stuffed in a car bound for London, then smuggled to the States. She said she was forced to work in several East Coast cities, servicing up to 20 johns each night. She was moved to Houston, and from there decided to run. Eventually, she phoned Oglesby to say her pimp had caught up with her and broken her bones, and she was in an Alabama hospital. After that, Oglesby couldn’t reach Katelyn for a long time and feared she was dead. But then Katelyn called again.

Having recently written a story about teenage prostitutes, I was patched in for our only conversation. Soon after, Oglesby informed me that Katelyn was safe, and I never heard another word from either of them. Maybe the girl went into hiding, watching over her shoulder for any sign of her pursuing pimp, piecing together a normal life. Or maybe she’s not who she claimed to be. Local police wondered whether the girl’s story was even true.

Regardless, the experiences she 
described of a life in captivity are frighteningly real—there are twice as many human slaves in the world today as there were when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation: Some 27 million men, women, boys and girls are trafficked for labor, sex and profit in an industry that makes $32 billion a year. There are Katelyns 
everywhere.  

The massive international slave trade provides the dark backdrop for Call + Response, a new documentary from musician Justin Dillon and Fair Trade Pictures that’s set for limited release this fall. The film weaves together personal stories, hidden-camera footage, musical performances and interviews with activists as varied as Cornel West, Daryl Hannah, and Madeleine Albright.

The stories are gut-wrenching: about a brothel fire that claimed the lives of two teen girls because they were chained in their rooms; about generations of families forced into slavery to repay what began as a $5 loan; about a slave worker who survived his fate by taking pride in the handicrafts he was forced to create.

Interspersed throughout are black-and-white studio performances from a diverse cast of musical acts. Talib Kweli delivers his blistering conscience-rap “Broken Glass.” Matisyahu improvises on the Bob Marley classic “Redemption Song.” Rocco Deluca plays “I Trust You To Kill Me,” a modernized, grinding slide-guitar blues. Imogen Heap, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids and Five For Fighting all turn in subtly passionate performances. The film’s most moving moment comes when  Emmanuel Jal—a former child soldier in Sudan’s Civil War—raps about his own life as a slave to military masters.

According to Dillon, the movie aims to do more than create awareness. “Awareness is a ’90s word,” he said to an audience of 150 at a recent Atlanta screening. “It’s now about action.” The idea is to jolt the public from its seated position between “obliviousness and despair” and get crowds to stand up and fight using their personal skills and passions to effect change on one small, “finishable” project at a time.

The music in the film is the call, he said, and now it’s time for everyday people to provide the response.