Nefarious: Merchant of Souls

(pictured) with the sex industry in Eastern Europe, presenting the former as open and public and the latter as secretive and brutal. Nefarious: Merchant of Souls documents modern human trafficking, specifically sexual slavery. While there are men and boys who are trafficked around the world, the United States Department of State (DoS) estimates that about 80% of human trafficking victims are female, and the film focuses on them. Information is presented from a Christian worldview—despite the subject matter, there is no profanity or nudity in the film, although there are scenes showing alcohol consumption and women wearing skimpy clothing. While the violent acquisition of sex slaves depicted in the first sequence of the film does occur in reality, Jimmy Stewart of Charisma wrote that most girls who are sexually trafficked in Europe are recruited through a fraudulent offer of employment and an improved lifestyle overseas, neither of which ultimately materializes in the new country. Nefarious asserts that there is a link between the international sex industry and legal prostitution in the Western world, The film contrasts the secretiveness and brutality of the sex industry in Eastern Europe with the openness of public prostitution in the Netherlands. Nefarious suggests that sex trafficking in Southeast Asia is fuelled largely by the complicity of the victims' parents, that the average age of those forced into prostitution in the U.S. is 13, that the commercial sexual exploitation of children victimizes almost two million children globally, that 80% of trafficked women and 50% of trafficked children are sexually exploited, that 161 UN member states engage in human trafficking, and that modern slavery has an annual revenue of —according to the film, higher than the annual revenues of Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League and the National Hockey League combined. The film indicates that "trafficking is an exploitation of vulnerability" and expresses the need to "take away the stigma that [prostitutes] choose to be there." Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves is quoted as saying that there are 27 million slaves in the world. The film ends with the assertion that only Jesus can free people from sexual slavery. ==Contents==

Re-enactments and live footage (left), also served as the narrator and interviewer. Nefarious covers human trafficking in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. A victim of ordeals such as these, speaking in voiceover, explains that, in this situation, girls are often taken into a separate room to have their sexual performance tested. Identifying these events as taking place near Belgrade, Serbia, the film then tracks the fictional girls through Croatia to Amsterdam's red-light district De Wallen, and to sex markets in Berlin and Las Vegas. man out of a town where he was trying to purchase sex with a child. The film includes an interview with a man referring to himself as "Vlad", who formerly trafficked in humans and drugs in Europe for eleven years. Vlad explains that traffickers control their victims by drugging them, physically abusing them, or threatening to abuse them. He claims that traffickers consider themselves most successful when the exploited girls start responding immediately to shouted, one-word commands. Vlad describes beating girls who tried to run away and says that he felt little remorse after such incidents; the large sums of money involved made him indifferent to the girls' fate. Other victims of trafficking speak about having been the objects of physical abuse and attempted murder. Nevada prostitutes describe having gone into prostitution in Las Vegas after watching the film Pretty Woman. The leader of an organization working to rescue girls from prostitution in Cambodia says that it is not the poorest parents who sell their children into sexual slavery but rather the parents who are looking to buy luxury goods. He therefore argues that sex trafficking is a spiritual and moral issue that cannot be solved by education or money. In another interview, a man purchasing sex in Thailand says that he believes the girls are happy to be working as prostitutes. Another interview features an American man who had been a sex tourist in Asia. ==Production==

Background Nefarious was written, Exodus Cry, which distributed the film, Nolot founded Exodus Cry in 2007 after a woman he did not know gave him , saying that God told her to do so in order that Nolot might found an anti-human-trafficking organization. (although articles written at the time only mention the existence of 2,400 suspects as opposed to arrests, and indicate that the crime they were being accused of was possession and distribution of child pornography rather than human trafficking). Filming Filming of Nefarious was started in 2007, Actors in these re-enactment scenes included Bill Oberst Jr., Christian Simpson (as Christian J. Simpson), Allison Weissman, Sarah Agor, and Jess Allen. John Samuel Hanson composed the film score for Nefarious after having worked on such other projects as 16 Blocks, Constantine, The Book of Eli, and Lost. As of January 2012, Nolot was producing two sequels to Nefarious. ==Release==

Official release and grassroots screenings , which makes it illegal to buy, but not to sell, sex. The film was officially released on July 27, 2011, The Justice Alliance, a Christian nonprofit organization that raises awareness about human trafficking, hosted a screening in the auditorium of El Dorado Middle School in Kansas. Florida Abolitionist, a non-governmental organization that also opposes human trafficking, sponsored a screening at the Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida. Most of the attendees were Christians. one of which took place before the Parliament of Tasmania. The Government of Tasmania was considering reforms to the Tasmanian sex industry at the time and the ACL was disappointed because the only politicians who showed up to the screening were four members of the Liberal Party. The ACL planned screenings in the rest of the states of Australia as well, hoping to convince legislators that the criminalization of the purchase of sex is the only effective way of combatting sexual slavery. Another screening was held at United Nations headquarters in New York City in March 2012 during that year's session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Home video release and subsequent screenings Nefarious was released on home video on May 1, 2012. In September, the film was screened at The Rome International Film Festival in Rome, Georgia, the Midwest Christian-Inspirational Indie Film Festival in Chicago, Illinois, and the Atlanta International Documentary Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Nefarious was screened at Oaxaca FilmFest two months later. The Rose Marine Theater in Fort Worth, Texas hosted a screening in celebration of Human Rights Day in December. Other screenings have taken place in South Korea, Hong Kong, Bermuda, and Canada. The Hong Kong premiere was attended by such people as Clement Cheng, Lori Chow, Cathy Leung, Pamela Peck, Nancy Sit, and Grace Wong, and the subsequent three weeks of screenings were all sold out. In May 2013, Katarina MacLeod, a former sex slave, spoke at a screening in Peterborough, Ontario hosted by Canadian Baptist Women of Ontario and Quebec. Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry's Director of Awareness and Prevention, screened the film in several countries in an attempt to persuade governments to make laws similar to Sweden's Sex Purchase Act, which criminalizes the purchasing rather than the selling of sex. Because Sweden now has the lowest human trafficking rate in the European Union, Mickelwait argued that such laws decrease the demand for commercial sex and effectively combat related organized crime (although other sources have since claimed that "sex workers in Sweden now experience increased risk of violence", and state that "the law has failed in its abolitionist ambition to decrease levels of prostitution, since there [is] no reliable data demonstrating any overall decline in people selling sex.") At some screenings, Exodus Cry solicited funds for the halfway houses it runs in Moldova called LightHouses, where victims of sex trafficking are given help. ==Reception==

Critical response Both Jim Uttley of Indian Life Newspaper and Pastor Jamie Bagley of The News of Cumberland County called Nefarious "hard-hitting". called the film "a powerful, compelling and transformational documentary about human trafficking and sex slavery" and wrote that it was amazing that the film covered an inherently sexual topic both honestly and without nudity. ==See also==