Here’s something for you to keep on your calenders for the New Year: Not My Life, a documentary on modern day slavery, narrated by Ashley Judd—and featuring Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales—will premiere in January.
The director of Not My Life is Robert Bilheimer, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1988 for The Cry of Reason, a documentary based on the life of Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist Beyers Naude. Bilheimer’s second film was 2003’s A Closer Walk, a documentary on the worldwide AIDS epidemic narrated by Will Smith and Glenn Close, featuring interviews with human rights luminaries and celebrities like the Dalai Lama, Bono and Sade. This film has been viewed by over 300 million people—a success they hope to replicate with Not My Life.
The film was shot all over world, including, notably, the United States, where child sex trafficking is explored. The film also features several locations where Free the Slaves works: child labor in Ghana, slave labor in Brazil and labor and sex trafficking in India.
Watch the trailer for Not My Life after the jump!
Here is a synposis, via Worldwide Documentaries production (which produced Not My Life):
A FILM ABOUT SLAVERY IN OUR TIME—A STORY ABOUT THE WAY THE WORLD IS
Not My Life is the first documentary film to depict the horrifying and dangerous practices of human trafficking and modern slavery on a global scale.
Filmed on five continents over a period of four years, Not My Life unflinchingly, but with enormous dignity and compassion, depicts the unspeakable practices of a multi-billion dollar global industry whose profits, as the film’s narration says, “ are built on the backs and in the beds of our planet’s youth.”
While acknowledging that trafficking and slavery are universal crimes, affecting millions of human beings all over the world, Not My Life zeroes in on the fact that the vast majority of trafficking and slavery victims are indeed children. This fundamental truth, says the film’s director, Oscar® nominee Robert Bilheimer, raises profound questions about the very nature of our civilization. “What kind of society cannibalizes its own children?” Bilheimer asks. “Can we do these sorts of things on such a large scale and still call ourselves human in any meaningful sense of the term?”
Not My Life features dignified and inspiring testimony from survivors; depictions of trafficking, exploitation, and slavery in all parts of the world including forced labor in Africa; street begging and garbage picking in India; sexual trafficking in the United States and Southeast Asia; and various forms of child enslavement and abuse in both North and South America.
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