Not My Life is a 2011 American independent documentary film about human trafficking and contemporary slavery. The film was written, produced, and directed by Robert Bilheimer, who had been asked to make the film by Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Bilheimer planned Not My Life as the second installment in a trilogy, the first being A Closer Walk and the third being the unproduced Take Me Home. The title Not My Life came from a June 2009 interview with Molly Melching, founder of Tostan, who said that many people deny the reality of contemporary slavery because it is an uncomfortable truth, saying, "No, this is not my life."
Filming of Not My Life took four years to complete, and documented human trafficking in 13 countries: Albania, Brazil, Cambodia, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Italy, Nepal, Romania, Senegal, Uganda, and the United States. The first and last scenes of the film take place in Ghana, and show children who are forced to fish in Lake Volta for 14 hours a day. The film also depicts sex trafficking victims, some of whom are only five or six years old.
Fifty people are interviewed in the film, including investigative journalist Paul Radu of Bucharest, Katherine Chon of the Polaris Project, and Iana Matei of Reaching Out Romania. Don Brewster of Agape International Missions says that all of the girls they have rescued from child sex tourism in Cambodia identify Americans as the clients who were the most abusive to them. The film was dedicated to Richard Young, its cinematographer and co-director, after he died in December 2010. It had its premiere the following month at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. The narration was completely rerecorded in 2011, replacing Ashley Judd's voice with that of Glenn Close. The version of the film that was aired by CNN International as part of the CNN Freedom Project was shorter than the version shown at the premiere. In 2014, a re-edited version of the film was released.
Not My Life addresses many forms of slavery, including the military use of children in Uganda, involuntary servitude in the United States, forced begging and garbage picking in India, sex trafficking in Europe and Southeast Asia, and other kinds of child abuse. The film also focuses on the people and organizations engaged in working against human trafficking. The film asserts that most victims of human trafficking are children. Actress Lucy Liu said that people who watch Not My Life "will be shocked to find [human trafficking] is happening in America." Lucy Popescu of CineVue criticized the film for focusing on the victims, arguing that the perpetrators of trafficking should have been dealt with more prominently. Not My Life was named Best World Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival in September 2012.
Themes Not My Life is a documentary film about human trafficking and contemporary slavery. It addresses many forms of slavery, including the military use of children in Uganda, involuntary servitude in the United States, unfree labor in Ghana, forced begging and garbage picking in India, sex trafficking in Europe and Southeast Asia, and other kinds of child abuse. The focus of the film is on trafficking victims, especially women and children, the latter of whom are often betrayed by adults that they trust. The film also focuses on the people and organizations engaged in working against human trafficking, including members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Free the Slaves, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS), International Justice Mission (IJM), the Somaly Mam Foundation, Terre des hommes, Tostan, UNICEF, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the United States Department of State (US DoS). Not My Life has been called "a cautionary tale". It depicts the commodification of millions of people and identifies the practices of traffickers as undermining international economics, security, sustainability and health.
Not My Life calls attention to the fact that, in the United States, the sentencing for human trafficking is less severe than for drug trafficking. The film indicates a relationship between contemporary slavery and globalization. It asserts that most human trafficking victims are children, although the filmmakers have recognized the fact that millions of adults are also trafficked. The film depicts human trafficking as a matter of good and evil, provides interviews with survivors of human trafficking, and presents analysis from anti-trafficking advocates. Throughout the film, Robert Bilheimer encourages viewers to personally combat human trafficking. Bilheimer was sparing in his use of statistics in the film, feeling that overloading viewers with figures might numb them to the issues.
According to Nancy Keefe Rhodes of Stone Canoe, a U.S. literary journal, the film's audiences are likely to have the preconception that human trafficking is not slavery in the same sense that the Atlantic slave trade was, and many people believe that slavery was abolished a long time ago with such instruments as the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment. Rhodes writes that society now uses the word "slavery" in modern contexts only as a metaphor, so that references to actual contemporary slavery can be dismissed as hyperbole,Rhodes, p. 13. and she describes the film's goal as to "reclaim the original term [slavery] and convince us that what is happening now is what happened then: highly organized and pervasive, intentional, highly profitable and ... fully as coercive and wantonly cruel." Rhodes says that the word "slavery" has started to be used in its original sense again in recent years, but that audiences' views on contemporary slavery are nonetheless influenced by the slave-like imagery in such films as Hustle & Flow (2005) and Black Snake Moan (2007). The Academy Award-winning Hustle & Flow portrays a pimp as the hero, while Black Snake Moan features Christina Ricci as a young nymphomaniac; the marketing for Black Snake Moan centered on evocative, sexualized slave imagery, including a scantily-clad Ricci in chains.Rhodes, p. 12. According to Rhodes, Bilheimer "rescue[s] modern slaves from representation as exotic creatures, to restore their humanity" and allow audiences to relate to them. For this purpose, Bilheimer tells stories of individuals in the context of their communities and families.Rhodes, p. 14. While Bilheimer had previously done extensive social justice work with religious organizations, he did not proselytize in the film, despite the many opportunities the film afforded him to do so.Rhodes, p. 16.
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Fifty people are interviewed in Not My Life, including Katherine Chon of the Polaris Project, investigative journalist Paul Radu of Bucharest, Vincent Tournecuillert of Terre des hommes, Iana Matei of Reaching Out Romania,Rhodes, p. 6. UNICEF Director of Programmes Nicholas Alipui, Susan Bissell of UNICEF's Child Protection Section, Antonio Maria Costa of UNODC, Somaly Mam of the Somaly Mam Foundation, Molly Melching of Tostan in Senegal, and Suzanne Mubarak, who was First Lady of Egypt at the time. The sex trafficking victims shown in the film include children as young as five and six years old.
Not My Life begins with a black screen on which the words "Human trafficking is slavery" appear in white.Rhodes, p. 1. A sequence filmed in Ghana follows, showing children who are forced to fish in Lake Volta for 14 hours a day. Many of the children die as a result of the working conditions. A 10-year-old boy swims through the murky water towards the camera, looking into it, and holds his breath underwater while trying to unsnarl a fishing net. Next, Senegalese talibes, Muslim boys who attend Quranic schools, appear. There are approximately 50,000 talibes in Senegal who are forced to beg on the streets to make money for their teachers; children who do not meet their quotas are beaten. Many of these children suffer from skin and stomach diseases because of their diet of spoiled food—one demonstrates his diseased hands to the camera, only for an adult to pull him away by the ear. The film then moves to India and depicts children, mostly wearing flip-flops, illegally sorting through hazardous waste in GhazipurRhodes, p. 4. and New Delhi landfills. Romani families are shown in Central and Eastern Europe, and the narration indicates that Romani boys are often trafficked for the purpose of forced child begging, and that Romani girls are regularly trafficked as child prostitutes. The narrator says that the profits of human trafficking "are built on the backs and in the beds of our planet's youth."
In Zoha Prison in Romania, there are interviews with traffickers serving prison sentences that the film suggested were too short in light of the severity of the crime of human trafficking. The typical sentence for this crime is six or seven years, while the sentence for trafficking in drugs is normally twenty years. Two Romanian traffickers, Traian and Ovidiu, attest to having starved, punched, and kicked the girls they trafficked. Ovidiu recounts a story, in an interview filmed in February 2007, about kidnapping a prostitute and selling her for sex when he was 14. He expresses no remorse for these actions. The sentences served by Traian and Ovidiu were short enough that, by the time the film was released, they were no longer in prison. Ana, a girl they trafficked, is also interviewed in the film, saying that she lost a tooth in one of her beatings. She describes being pregnant at the time, but not telling this to her captors because of fears for the unborn child's safety.
Radu is interviewed in this portion of the film, as is Tournecuillert, who speaks about his experiences in Albania, where he heard about the sex trafficking of girls and how some of the girls would be shot or burned to death as a warning to the other girls. He describes how Albanian girls are often rounded up to be sexually trafficked in Italy. He further explains that, normally, before they leave Albania, the traffickers kill one of the girls in front of the others—usually by burning or shooting—to demonstrate what will happen to others who try to escape. Matei adds that, for the sake of amusement, some of the girls would be buried alive with only their heads remaining above ground. Eugenia Bonetti, a nun, speaks about her work helping girls escape from slavery in Italy.Rhodes, p. 15.
Another interview is with a Wichita, Kansas woman named Angie who was prostituted with another girl, Melissa, in the American MidwestRhodes, p. 8. when they were teenagers. Angie recounts how they were expected to have sex with truck drivers and steal their money. She describes an incident when, after Melissa found pictures of a man's grandchildren in his wallet, they realized he was old enough to be their own grandfather. "I wanted to die," she says, close to tears. Outside the film, Bilheimer said that Angie's trafficker expected her to engage in forty sex acts a night, and threatened to kill her if she refused. "It's not just truck drivers," FBI agent Mike Beaver says. "We're seeing them purchased and abused by both white collar and blue collar individuals." This statement segues into a Washington, D.C., scene wherein two girls in their early teens are shown by a curb on K Street, changing into prostitutes' attire.
Angie was rescued during Operation Stormy Nights, an anti-human-trafficking operation carried out by the FBI, in 2004. Bilheimer said that, while there is no way of being certain how many girls like Angie are being sexually trafficked in the U.S., "diligent people out there have arrived at a bare minimum figure of ... one hundred thousand girls, eight to fifteen [performing] ten sex acts a day" adding up to "a billion unpunished crimes of sexual violence on an annual basis."Rhodes, p. 46.