Source: Central Florida Future
By Emily Blackwood
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Though the history books may say slavery ended with the Civil War, there are currently 27 million people enslaved throughout the world, with 2.5 million located in the United States, according to the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking. These people are exploited for sex, physical labor and servitude, and UCF film graduate student Max Rousseau wants to do something about it.
Human trafficking is not centrally focused around prostitution, as some people might think. Domestic slavery, also known as domestic servitude, happens when people are brought in to work as maids but are taken advantage of by their employers and become subjected to sexual and physical abuse. They are forced to work up to 19 hours a day for little pay and are not allowed to leave the home, according to GlobalResearch.ca. This is one of the least-reported varieties of human trafficking.
Domestic servitude often happens without people knowing, and in places it wouldn’t be expected. This is the idea that Rousseau wanted to recreate. His movie Pembroke Circle, which he is set to start filming in June, is about a young girl named Grace who notices dark changes when her father takes in a foreign maid.
“I wanted to portray the issue, but I also wanted to show a character that you could relate to,” Rousseau said. “It’s told in the audience’s point of view where they are just thinking that this could never happen and they slowly realize, like the main character does, that this could happen to anyone.”
Sarah Sculco, a freshman at Winter Park High School who plays lead role Grace, said that this movie is not only a great story, but that it will give people more information on an issue that isn’t very well understood.
“The importance is awareness of human trafficking and that it really is going on because I had no idea what it even was,” Sculco said. “The most important thing is to inform people.”
Rousseau used to be part of the majority who were unaware of domestic slavery. When he was in middle school, he wrote a fictional script on how different the world would be if slavery still existed.
“I kept going back to that script I wrote and was like, ‘Wow, I thought this was a figment of my imagination, but it is actually happening,’” Rousseau said. “Ever since then, I knew I wanted to tell a story about it.”
Initially, Rousseau wanted to make a film about sex trafficking, but the more research he did and people he talked to, he discovered his script was portraying domestic servitude.
“It’s completely different from sex trafficking,” Rousseau said. “Sex trafficking is for prostitution and things like that. What I was looking at was domestic servitude, where somebody is basically forced to work inside somebody’s home as a maid but they are also raped and physically abused.”
Laura Mejia, who will attend UCF in the fall, plays Mariela, the subject of domestic slavery.
Mejia said that many students are unaware of what human and sex trafficking really are. She hopes this movie will help people understand that this can happen to anyone.
“Evil can be found anywhere. Horrible acts like human and sex trafficking can occur anywhere, behind closed doors,” Mejia said. “I hope that people will see this film and become aware that what the characters Grace and Mariela experience in the film is something that people have gone through in real life.”
Pembroke Circle launched a Kickstarter campaign on March 15 for people to help fund the project. With a goal of $15,000 and only 20 days to go, the team is doing all it can to try to raise money for filming.
“The way Kickstarter works is that you set a time limit and a funding goal and you have to reach that goal in the time allotted or nobody gets charged,” Rousseau said. “So this film is not going to get made unless we reach our goal.”
To donate or to watch a preview scene of the movie visit: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1153862509/pembroke-circle-feature.
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