ScreenPrism talked with Sold (2016) director Jeff Brown about bringing awareness to sex trafficking, filming in the red light district in Kolkata and working with Gillian Anderson.

ScreenPrism: What were the early stages of adapting the book into a film like?

Jeff Brown: We optioned the book and then we were stuck in the water for about two years. It really took off about five and a half years ago. It’s been all we’ve been doing for about six years now.

SP: That’s a long slog!

JB: Yeah, but it has been very rewarding because so much has already occurred. We’re really thrilled about those NGP organizations that have partnered with us, and everyone around the world working for real change on this issue. (Visit the Sold website for all sorts of information on how to get involved and see the movie.)

Jeff Brown, director of Sold (2016)

SP: You optioned the book from Patricia McCormick – what input did she have in the process?

JB: Patricia is one of those incredibly generous artists. She is so respectful of other artists. She read many drafts of our screenplay and chimed in with only a few things here and there. She really gave us a tremendous amount of freedom to make it into our own work of art. She’s very respectful and supportive of that process. Very generous in that way. I think she really liked the fact that we always checked in; it was a very easy collaborative effort. There was no “You gotta do this or that” from her or from us; we were really open to hearing her ideas and we incorporated pretty much all of them. We hadn’t gone to Nepal [before optioning the book] and after I went there, I started bringing a lot of interviews I had with sex workers and survivors into the film – just literally dialogue that was said to me during interviews became part of the film. I learned more intimately from the people all the permutations of what [sex trafficking] looks like and how it effects people. That all became part of how we interpreted it. We walked in Patricia’s footsteps. She went to India and Nepal, and it is important to note that on the border between India and Nepal they have 11 posts there to monitor the border.

They have survivors of sex trafficking, very young, about 18 to 22 years old, that monitor the border crossing with the police; 11 of the 26 at this point are monitored for sex trafficking. We went to one of those border crossings and spent a day there. We watched the young people intercept others who were being trafficked. That made it utterly heart-wrenching and real for us. What they did was they separated the young girls from the trafficker, they questioned them separately, and if there was any concern that this was trafficking, they then tried to contact the girl’s parents. There’s all kinds of ways that traffickers work. If it’s a guy, he might have courted the girl and said he is going to marry her, or told her parents that he is going to give her a job offer. It might be that the trafficker gives the girl a knockout pill and she might be out, she might be unconscious at the border. There are all different kinds of ways to traffic.

The girls who help at the border have all been trafficked and know what to look for. They are looking for smartly dressed young girls being accompanied by someone who does not look like a relative or who might look like a relative but doesn’t know much about them.

It was horrifying. I went there to scout this location to see what it looked like - when filming, we were pretty sure we were going to have to recreate the border somewhere else. I wanted to see it, videotape it, take a lot of photographs so we could accurately duplicate it somewhere else, which we in fact did. I also wanted to see how that border monitoring worked. The day started at our hotel with my cameraman going downstairs at 7. He ran right back upstairs with his coffee and said, “Hurry up, you have to come downstairs, I think there’s a raid happening at the hotel next door.” I ran downstairs and there was a raid. We sat on the bench sipping our coffee watching this raid happen. There was this hotel called Venus and the day before when we checked in. I [had] said, “look at that hotel! That’s just like a hotel where the traffickers would take their people! Hotel Venus – a cheesy place they might use.” And that is where the raid happened. That was before we went to the border crossing. The women who help monitor the border do so from about 8am to 5pm or 6pm at night. This was earlier, at 7am, and they had arranged a raid.

SP: That’s incredible – talk about art imitating life.

JB: And from Kolkata, then there is Sanlaap, which is the place where I took all my actors and crew to the red light district. All my actors had very long conversations with survivors of trafficking as well as with people who were still actively doing sex work. In Sanlaap, one time I went there and a girl had just been rescued about half an hour before I got there. That was about the most heartbreaking thing I had ever seen in my life. She didn’t trust anyone, she was terrified, and she was now in a safe place and didn’t even know it. And the staff told me that any time anyone is brought in from a brothel, they are placed on 24/hour, 7-day- a-week watch for months. The girls often try to escape or kill themselves or hurt others. They’re suffering; they’ve been raped 15, 20 times a night, sometimes for years. The staff has to help them reestablish their trust– with life, with themselves, with humanity. It’s kind of like bringing someone back from the dead; they are kind of numbed out. What is extraordinary was watching the girls who were already there go over to her, bring her things like clothes, talk to her quietly, tell her that she’s safe, [that] they’ll watch out for her and be her older sisters. All these survivors are helping each other. There’s humanity in the horror; the girls are taking care of each other.

SP: One of the things that Rushira Gupta said at the UN panel was that no girl can rescue herself. They all need help to get out of sex work.

JB: She’s said that to me several times, but I have interviewed a number of girls who got themselves out. Here in LA, I interviewed a girl from Eastern Europe who had been tied to a bed for many weeks and extremely abused. She heard a girl in the next room that she never saw, but heard, and she heard this girl get killed. She was shot. This girl started to fear that she was going to die, so she sang this song to give herself the courage to live and get out. As she sang it, she rewrote it – it is about a bird who is torn limb from limb as the people who caught it are eating it – she rewrote it so the bird escaped. That was the turning point for her. She kicked her way out of a window in her room that was boarded up and jumped out of the window and ran. As far as trafficking in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, about 30% of [the girls] escape, but they do have help from a taxi driver or someone else. Also, a lot of the kids we met in the rescue have HIV or AIDS. 60 to 80 percent have HIV or AIDS. Those girls are thrown out [of the brothels].

SP: What were the filming challenges like in Kolkata? Were you stigmatized for the topic you were filming?

JB: We filmed in a building that was a stone’s throw from the actual red light district in Sonagachi – it’s the largest red light district in the world. It’s basically a city of brothels; its 20 square blocks of brothel building, each 4 or 5 stories, and each housing 100 to 200 women who are selling themselves. Walking around there…the first time I walked around there I came back to the hotel and I was just sobbing. The last time I walked around there, I went with my art director, Tabasheer Zutshi – she did the costumes and the production design. We took over the brothel building for three weeks before filming so she could work on the treatment of the walls and bring in the dividers and beds to recreate what we’d seen in real brothels. I was telling her a couple things about how the wardrobe should change, but she was pointing out, “See, there’s that dress I wanted! That woman is wearing it!” She had the look down perfectly.

We wanted to be true to the experience of these women. You don’t have a judgment on these women, you can’t view them like that. Some of them are trafficked, some are trafficking themselves to support 10 family members. Basically, it’s lack of choice, poverty, lack of equality between men and women, and for some women this is an expeditious way to make money to feed their family or their extended family. One of the older girls says to Lakshmi in the movie, “Don’t trust pretty boys – they’ll steal your heart and then your money.” That line came directly from an interview I had in a Nepali brothel. I spent the day in the brothel with an NGO social worker. I interviewed the women who worked there and the madam.

The first young woman that I interviewed was supporting 10 family members who were living at a refugee camp – they were kicked out of Bhutan for demanding the right to vote. They had been there almost 20 years in the refugee camp in northern India. They were starving. So she went and prostituted herself to feed her family. I asked her if her family knew what she was doing and she said, “No, they’ll never know because I’ll never tell them. They can’t know.” She has a cell phone; she goes back a few times a year to give them money so they can eat. Any judgment I had before I started doing these interviews just went out the window. These were remarkable people who were surviving in any way they could and helping others to survive as well.

Niyar Saikia as Lakshmi in Sold (2016)

SP: You mentioned that you were in the biggest red light district in the world. Where do you think that immense demand comes from?

JB: Yes, men have created it and, at times, the society exacerbates it and creates it as well. When you talk about India and Nepal, you’re talking about post-Colonial countries where there is no rule of law. If you’re poor, you better stay as far away from the police as possible because if you have anything to do with the police, it is going to be utterly horrendous for you and your family. The police are utterly corrupt and purchased by those with money and means. When I went to the brothels in Mumbai, the day after I got off the plane in India I went to the brothels with three young men from the film company that was hosting us. They had never been to the brothels and I had not either. They were supposed to be my bodyguards. When we got to the entrance to the area, which is also referred to as “The Cages,” there’s this giant, well-lit police station with all these fat policemen sitting there. You walk past that, and all these pimps were coming up to us and asking us to come into this place or that place, and the police were walking around basically making sure business ran as usual. If someone was drunk or disorderly, they would deal with them. I wasn’t scared of the pimps; I was scared of the cops.

What’s happening with the men is that you have migrant laborers who come from rural areas to make money. They come into the cities to find work, they live 10 to 20 men in a room. They have nothing. They work very hard and make very little as day laborers, and then they go to the brothels when they have a little bit of money. It is very inexpensive to buy a girl – buying a girl in India is like buying a beer. It’s the same price. It can go up from there, but the migrant workers go to brothels that are very inexpensive. Of course, there are different levels, ones for wealthy businessmen with courtesans who are thousands per night. But the regular migrant workers, this is what they do to give their lives some comfort. They are breaking stones all day, they are doing heavy construction. I watched them at a Nepali brothel to see what the clientele looked like. I thought they’d be these dirty old men, but no. They were these young guys who were sort of dressed for a date; their hair was oiled and brushed, they were kind of living this Bollywood fantasy of having a date with a prostitute. The price is low, and if you are a woman in India, you don’t have sex with anyone until you get married, and then you only have sex with your husband. So there are all these young men with no outlet for their sexual urges. If you are a woman and you sleep with a man and your family finds out, no one will ever marry you.

SP: All these factors are conspiring to perpetuate the cycle.

JB: And then there’s female infanticide. In India and Russia and China, [where] 15% of the girls are killed in utero, there are a lot less women being born. And if you’re a farmer and have 5 kids and 3 are daughters, and you only have one dowry, only one daughter will be able to get married and have a traditional future. The other two daughters will have no future in that culture.

What has to change is that if you educate girls and they are empowered, they can bring in money to the family – these are new ideas and concepts. It is changing, but it is a slow and incremental process. The best thing you can do is empower girls because then they will have less kids; they will be empowered to work and make money. That money will not be spent on alcohol; the money will be spent bettering their families. If you educate a girl, you are helping an entire family. (Support girls’ education at Taught Not Trafficked.)

SP: So many studies have been done saying that if you educate the women, it lifts up the whole society.

JB: It doubles the GNP of a country.

SP: Can you speak a little bit about the casting process?

JB: We knew going in that this whole movie was on her shoulders. My biggest fear was that we were not going to find someone to pull this off. That was my only concern! We spent 6 months casting [the role of Lakshmi]. We hired [casting associate] Mehvash Husain in Mumbai. She’s Nepali, and she went all over India and videotaped 700 kids. I saw over 700 kids but she saw probably over 1000. She would go into schools, acting classes, and somehow she heard about Niyar [Saikia, who plays Lakshmi]. She had won a government acting scholarship, which means she had all her acting classes paid for for her entire high school career. So she is already sort of ‘discovered.’ Mehvash went to northern India to meet her. I was also auditioning Nepali girls in the US. I saw her video and I knew we’d found her. I was laughing and crying, watching her audition. She was just so bright and funny and present and she could also become heartwrenchingly sad and go to the depths of despair. She was just a smart, happy, bright young light. I’ve worked with thousands of kids; a lot of my directing has been with children. I’ve done 200 commercials, lots of TV shows, and she is a major discovery. Her talent is unparalleled; she is one of the best actors of any age that I’ve ever worked with.

SP: Does she have any upcoming work or is she still in school?

JB: She was offered another part, but they wanted her to shave her head – she has the longest hair, it goes all the way down to her knees. And she said no, she wasn’t going to shave her head. She’s been acting in plays and doing dance, and her dad is a composer and her mom is a singer. She’s performing all the time but mostly in school and short films. I think if she wants to do this, she will definitely have a career.

SP: How did you get Gillian Anderson involved in the project?

JB: I know Gillian because there was a book that I wanted to turn into a movie, and she had the rights to it. So I met with her, and we became friends. She wanted to write and direct it, and I told her I was happy to support her in that as a friend. Before there was any role [for] her, there was a photographer who was taking a picture in the movie after Lakshmi was rescued. She only had a few lines. Then I met Lisa Kristine.

Gillian Anderson as Sophia in Sold (2016)

SP: How did Lisa become involved? Did her photography help to inform the film?

JB: I chased her for about a year, sent her emails, and finally one person introduced me to her. We finally met and became really close friends. Her gift is photographing indigenous people all over the world and taking these photos of people who are in slavery, either sex slavery or slave labor, and [capturing] them in such a way that you can bear witness to the humanity of the person who is enslaved. And you are not looking at something passively, but something that draws you in, whether it’s a boat slave in Ghana or a Nepali woman in sex slavery. You see these people and you feel them, you understand their suffering. You also see the anger, and sadness, and light and humanity all at the same time.

SP: Did you find that Gillian’s background and humanitarian work were a helpful tool?

JB: Knowing the strong female characters that she’s portrayed, she’s a role model because she’s a powerful woman. She’s smart; she speaks her mind. We’ve become very good friends, and she is someone who is standing with us very profoundly to make a difference. She did the appeal, showed up and did press with us because she cared about the issue. She has really lent her voice to [the project] and continues to do so. Thanks to her we’ve managed to build 20 schools in Nepal using the film and the BBC appeal with Gillian. We hope in the spring to build 200 schools. You know, 5000 schools were destroyed in the earthquake. [About] a million kids don’t have a school to attend. They need school because kids are much more vulnerable to labor and sex trafficking if they are not in school.

SP: I definitely want to bring it to my alma mater.

JB: We make it very easy to bring it to your school; once you get 60 people to sign on to see it, you can bring it to a theater or your school. One of the main groups of people we want to reach are young people in high school and college, especially young women, since they will be the change makers going forward.

SP: Given that it can be challenging to create awareness among college kids from wealthy, insular backgrounds, what is your advice in discussing trafficking in a privileged setting?

JB: Racism and sexism are both the basis for trafficking. Subjugating girls as commodities often has another element, which is that the traffic victim is from another country, speaks another language, is [viewed as] other, less than. In India, the Untouchable caste is trafficked. In the US, trafficked girls are black, Hispanic, often from foster homes, often with an incarcerated and drug addicted parent, and often in and out of foster care. 80% of them are also molested at home and then by their pimp. Ultimately, they fall in love with the pimp through trauma bonding, and he isolates them from everyone else. I was calling it Stockholm for a while, but this woman who works with the victims said no, it is called trauma bonding.

This person is also the girl’s lover, and so she thinks he loves her, but he is totally manipulating her and several other girls, making a ton of money [while] they aren’t getting anything. He will exclude them and shun them if they bring home less than the minimum every night, furthering the cycle. I also hold a lot of compassion, though, for the pimps and traffickers; they were drafted into this life as well. Often they were molested as young children and abused, and the humanity is beaten out of them.

If you see a dog who snarls and bites at anyone who comes near, the dog wasn’t born like that. If that dog was allowed to heal, it would be a loving companion. The abuse has to be unpacked.