Center for Investigative Reporting

Learn more about The Price of Sex - we talked to Mimi about the challenges of going undercover for her documentary in our Behind the Story series. Watch here.

futurejournalismproject:

humanrightswatch:

The Price of Sex (Trailer):

The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives. Learn more at www.priceofsex.org .

FJP: The Price of Sex was written, directed and produced by Mimi Chakarova, won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.

If you’re in DC there’s a screening of the film this evening.

According to the new documentary “The Invisible War”, military women are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. This new film, premiering at the San Francisco Film Festival this week, looks at the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. We’ll be interviewing the director Kirby Dick about the production of his film for our series Behind the Story. What questions would you ask him?

“I mean, war is killing – intentional, organized, systematic killing. Telling this in a truthful way, but not putting so much in that you overload them or turn them off – this was a real challenge for me as a filmmaker. Literally and figuratively, my job with this film was to bring people out of that helicopter and down to the blood and the sand where people die.” - Oscar nominee James Spione discussing his documentary “Incident in New Baghdad” in our new Behind the Story segment.

Go behind the story in our new segment looking at the documentary ‘If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.’ Oscar nominee Marshall Curry discusses making this part coming-of-age, part cops-and-robbers thriller that asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism and terrorism.

From our “Behind the Story” series: More than 100 people, mostly women, are attacked with acid every year in Pakistan. Oscar winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy speaks about her investigation into this wave of violence and her award-winning film, which looks at what is being done to help women recover. “Saving Face” won the 2012 Academy Award for best documentary short. The HBO documentary film debuts March 8, 2012, on the cable channel.

californiawatch:

More than three years of research and filming resulted in this groundbreaking 2006 documentary that goes inside one of California’s most violent and organized gangs.

Nuestra Familia, Our Family, a presentation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Latino Public Broadcasting, features interviews in prison and on the streets with family members and gang members opening up about their lives, painting a haunting picture rarely seen by the public.

The film tells the story of a father in a small California farm town who raised his son to be a gang member. It follows the father’s painful struggle as he turns his own life around but then sees his son become deeply involved with the Nuestra Familia prison gang — and unknowingly falling into the grip of an FBI informant.

Learn more about the film. You can also buy the DVD through PayPal.

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of people from the former Soviet bloc migrated abroad with the hope for a better future. These waves of migration breathed life into one of the oldest yet darkest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of women from Eastern Europe have been sold into prostitution against their will. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian who immigrated to the U.S. during that period, investigates this rarely documented journey of trafficking in the documentary The Price of Sex.

If you’re in San Francisco, you can buy tickets now to see this film at the San Francisco Film Society on November 5.