to see other award winning films by Ellen Bruno or go to BrunoFilms.com.
Each year thousands of young girls are recruited from rural Burmesevillages to work in the sex industry in neighboring Thailand. Held for
years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme
abuse by pimps, clients, and the police.
The trafficking of Burmese girls has soared in recent years as a
direct result of political repression in Burma. Human rights
abuses, war and ethnic discrimination has displaced hundreds
of thousands of families, leaving families with no means of
livelihood. An offer of employment in Thailand is a rare
chance for many families to escape extreme poverty.
Sacrifice examines the social, cultural, and economic forces at work in the
trafficking of Burmese girls into prostitution in Thailand. It is the story of the
valuation and sale of human beings, and the efforts of teenage girls to survive
a personal crisis born of economic and political repression.
AWARDS
Gold Apple
National Educational Film Festival
Grand Prize
Religion Today Film Festival, Italy
Golden Spire Award
San Francisco International Film Festival
Documentary Film Competition
Sundance Film Festival
Jury Award
Charlotte Film Festival
REVIEWS
"Sacrifice counterpoints forthright tales of four young prostitutes with mesmerizing
images: a woman standing in a door frame awaiting her fate juxtaposed with
farmers cultivating the fields. The images make a poignant plea for survival,
both of the exiled women and the tormented land."
— Andrea Alsberg, Sundance Film Festival
"Sacrifice offers a view of the terrible odds faced by women born into
poverty where the only commodity for sale are their bodies. These are
complicated stories that get beneath tabloid headlines to capture, with
great visual invention, the dignity and damaged nobility of young Burmese
victims. The lives of these women are revealed to be the stuff of fairy tale…
the magic goes bad and the witch, the ogre, and the monster win the day
in this chilling view of sexual exploitation…one we have never seen before."
— B. Ruby Rich, San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Compelling interviews and beautiful photography create a complex portrait of
economic conditions in Burma, and the impact this has on families, rural
villages and the young women themselves."
— San Francisco International Film Festival
" Unflinching in its account of abuse and corruption, SACRIFICE derives
much of its power from the testimonies of four girls, who speak directly
to viewers with a painful directness beyond their young years. Bruno
demonstrates an exceptional knack for conveying the complex facts
and emotional upheaval of globally relevant true stories. In the sobering
yet poetic Sacrifice, Bruno presents the terribly moving first-person
accounts of four young girls from Burma who were virtually kidnapped
from their homes and forced into a life of prostitution in Thailand. As with
all her films. Bruno approaches difficult issues with the intent of uncovering
hard truths and giving voice to people who are too often marginalized or
misrepresented by mainstream media."
— Steven Jenkins, FILM/TAPE WORLD
"Sacrifice illuminates a difficult subject of major social consequence with
integrity and objective attachment. Told with delicate simplicity, Sacrifice
paints a picture of an unfamiliar reality that is, by turns, unbelievably ugly
and startlingly beautiful. The heartbreakingly eloquent words of the girls
leads viewer into a society whose more are almost completely alien to our own."
— Laurence Vittes, The Hollywood Reporter
Sacrifice: Child Prostitutes from Burma | BrunoFilms.com
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