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.

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.