The UN's Goodwill Ambassador to Combat Human
Trafficking, Sorvino is a passionate advocate for the cause—taking trips
abroad to observe the problem, researching the issue, giving speeches
and interviews on the topic, and, most recently, making a movie about
it. Trade of Innocents, a drama about the sex trafficking industry in Southeast Asia, opens Friday in New York and will expand to other theaters across the U.S. in the weeks ahead.
In the film, Sorvino plays the wife of an NGO worker
(Dermot Mulroney) in Cambodia who is trying to help local police crack
down on human trafficking. Sorvino's character, grieving the murder of
her own daughter, volunteers with girls who have been rescued from
sexual slavery.
As a young girl, Sorvino read the Diary of Anne Frank
and was influenced by the horrors of the holocaust. As a Harvard
student, she wrote her thesis on the causes of conflict between Chinese
and African students; she recently wrote (in Guideposts) that she "wanted to understand what gave rise to one human being's ability to see another as somehow less than human."
CT interviewed Sorvino recently by e-mail about Trade of Innocents and her passionate activism.
Why did you want to play this role?
I felt that it was a moving portrayal of the plight of
children being sold for sex, and highlighted some potent strategies to
fight it. Since I spend a great deal of my time working on that fight
with the UN, I felt it could be a powerful combination of my activist
efforts and my artistic ventures.
You did Lifetime TV's Human Trafficking back in 2005. Any similarities between the two projects?
They are both about modern day slavery, but Trade of Innocents
is exclusively about the sale of children for sexual exploitation, and
the protagonists are not law enforcement but NGO workers.
Dermot's
character works on undercover sting operations that gather evidence to
spur police raids on brothels dealing in little girls, and I play his
bereaved wife (we have lost our daughter to a pedophile) who is now
finding new hope by helping formerly trafficked girls rehabilitate in a
shelter. In real life, law enforcement and NGO efforts must go hand in
hand; it is the only way to tackle the crime from both the perpetrator
and victim sides of the fence.
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