Our Ugliest Crime: Holly exposes child-sex trafficking
Like the lead character in his film Holly, writer/producer Guy Jacobson stumbled unaware onto the issue of child sexual exploitation. The Israeli-born New York attorney was in the midst of a very long sabbatical, traveling around the world, when he found himself on the streets of Cambodia surrounded by a dozen young girls. “I’m talking really little, like five to seven years old, who were aggressively soliciting me for prostitution,” he recalls. “Hands straight to the crotch—nothing subtle—and I was kind of in shock, trying to remove their hands, saying ‘no touching, no touching.’ And one of the little girls told me in broken English, ‘I yum yum very good.’ And I’m like, ‘no.’ And she says, ‘I no money today, Mama san, she boxing me,’ meaning that the madam of the brothel would beat her up because she didn’t make any money. So I gave her some money, and I walked away and said, ‘I have to do something.’
“I started researching this subject matter and was horrified to find out not only that it wasn’t an isolated case, but that well over two million kids—some younger even than one year old—are kidnapped and sold to prostitution, sexual slavery and sexual exploitation worldwide every year.”
Jacobson couldn’t believe that someone like himself—well-educated, living in the media capital of the world—could be so oblivious to such a colossal issue. His fledgling production company, Priority Films, already had a couple of movies in development or pre-production, but he put them on hold and started writing a screenplay with director Guy Moshe about an American living in Cambodia who can no longer ignore what’s going on around him. Five years later, Holly is exposing audiences to the enormity of the issue without getting preachy, partly by casting Office Space’s Ron Livingston as Patrick (a very flawed character) and partly by never offering easy solutions. During one of his legally questionable errands for Freddie (played by the late Chris Penn, in his final role), Patrick meets Holly (Thuy Nguyen), a stubborn 12-year-old girl who’s been recently sold to a local brothel. He’s surprised to find that he cares about what happens to her, and his attempt to help her takes him across Cambodia.
“It was a very difficult line to walk,” Jacobson says. “We tried not to tell the story from the Hollywood perspective. … So it’s not, you know: Tom Cruise, he’s a cop, killing all of the bad people, saving all of the kids, the whole world is a better place, and we hug a tree and eat a pizza—because that’s really not what happens. I really wanted to do it as kind of a delicate, impossible love-story relationship between this little girl who is sort of kidnapped into prostitution, and show the world from her point of view.”
To get this realism, Jacobson went undercover into several Cambodian brothels to try to understand what the young girls face each day. He hung around, speaking with pimps and clients and eventually was able to exert enough pressure on authorities to shut some of the brothels down. Much of Holly was eventually filmed in a former brothel in Svay Pak, the village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh notoriously known as K11, a hot spot for child-sex tourism before it was shut down a few months earlier.