'Call + Response' Raises a Voice Against Human Trafficking

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Director Talks About New Documentary on Slavery

Director and producer Justin Dillon talks about his film, "Call + Response," a documentery about modern slavery.

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A man with a hidden camera is ushered through the streets of an Asian city, down an alley, through a curtain and into a room where four girls sit. "You can do boom-boom?" he asks the tallest girl.

"Yeah. It's okay," says the girl, who calls herself Yang. Her voice is as certain as if the man had asked for a cup of water.

We listen to child soldiers tell about being made to kill and rape and steal. We sit on the sofa with a woman in Europe who describes how her captors threatened to kill her daughter if she didn't sell her body. We glide along a man-made lake in Ghana. Tree limbs emerge from the water like the fingers of a dead man.

Actress and activist Julia Ormond appears on-screen, explaining that this is "the second largest man-made lake on the planet. When they made the lake, they flooded a certain area but they didn't clear the trees. So . . . the fishermen who go out there, their nets are constantly tangling in the tree stumps." The children are forced to dive down and free the nets. "They discovered the child slavery there," she says, "because of the number of children's bodies that were constantly washing up on the shore."

Ormond explains that some of the lake children have been rescued. The camera, with its hope that more can be rescued, moves inside a classroom, where rescued children sing.

"One of the few things that identified these kids was their inability to smile," Ormond recalled in an interview. "These children sang, 'If you are happy and you know it clap your hands.' And none of them can smile."

Other participants include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and scholar Cornel West.

In a melodic historical lecture, West tells Dillon why music has been such a strong force of liberation. "The only property slaves had was what? Their voices in their bodies. They held hands and they raised their voices. And call and response. Call and response. Lifting every voice, because at least at that moment you have a power and a dignity," he explains. "In the dark, when you couldn't see each other, all you had was your voices being raised so somebody in the world now or further down the line would hear your voice and recognize you are human, you have a right to be treated a certain kind of way and you are worthy of attention. The worst thing for all of us as human beings to feel is insignificant. Then we experience extinction."

The film pulls back the curtain on what we didn't know -- or believed we didn't know -- about contemporary slavery.

"We have boxes where we put things," Dillon said. "We have a box on slavery that is already . . . put on a shelf because it is history for us, for many people. There really is a new box. Part of the purpose of the film is to help the public open that box."

Often, he said, people who face the horror of human trafficking move from being oblivious to the paralysis of despair. The next thing to set in is apathy.

"It is a cycle of 'I need to see it. I don't want to see it. I need to know about it. I don't want to know about it,' " Dillon said. " 'I'm indignant. I'm upset. But what am I supposed to do about it?' "