Actor Kevin Kline's new film on the epidemic trafficking of human beings, with girls forced into prostitution and children into slave labor, opened on Wednesday at the UN.
The film entitled Trade, inspired by a three-year-old New York Times magazine article, tells the story of a 13-year-old Mexican girl and a young Polish woman kidnapped by traffickers and put up for sale in the US. Kline plays a Texas policeman who, with the girl's brother, sets off on a dangerous rescue attempt.
"It tells a story with a human face and tries to make it very real without sensationalizing," Kline told a news conference before the premiere. "The movie is gut-wrenching and alarming and disturbing, as it is meant to be."
PHOTO: AP
"It doesn't have blockbuster written all over it, but one hopes it will have a ripple effect - so the awareness level will be raised as much as it can be," he said.
Five percent of the proceeds during the first few months will go to the Vienna-based Office on Drugs and Crime.
Co-hosting the premiere at the UN was Equality Now, a New York-based advocacy group that campaigns for the human rights of women and girls worldwide.
PHOTO: AP
The director of the film is Marco Kreuzpaintner, considered one of Germany's leading young filmmakers.
Kline won an Academy Award for his madcap performance in the 1988 film, A Fish Called Wanda.
The US State Department reported that about 1.1 million people are smuggled across borders around the world every year, most of them women and children. And the UN International Labor Organization estimated that profits from trafficking humans are some US$32 billion a year.
Al Pacino is to star as Salvador Dali in a biographical movie about the great artist, with actor Cillian Murphy to play his protege.
Dali & I: The Surreal Story will span the 1960s to the 1980s, when most of Dali's major work was behind him and he became more flamboyant. Dali also developed a mentor-protege relationship with a young art dealer named Stan Lauryssens, to be played by Murphy.
Dali is scheduled to begin shooting in early next year on location in Spain and New York.
Ricky Gervais of The Office will take on the starring role in This Side of the Truth, Variety reported Thursday. Gervais will co-direct the film with his co-writer Matt Robinson in what will be his feature directing debut.
This Side of the Truth is set in a contemporary world where no one has ever lied. Gervais will play a performer who tells the first lie and harnesses its power for personal gain.
"My character works in the film industry, where actors are really readers who tell completely factual stories," Gervais told Variety. "My character's a loser who's about to lose his job, and who's lumbering through the 1300s. All he's got to work with is the Black Death. But once he lies and pretends he's found lost stories, he becomes the greatest storyteller in the world."
Hijos de la Guerra (Children of the War) is among the films featured this week during the Vistas Film Festival, a five-day international event in Dallas showcasing Latino-themed pictures.
Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the brutal gang intrigued filmmaker Alexandre Fuchs so much that he decided his first feature film would look at the their history. Hijos de la Guerra takes viewers from gang-ridden areas of Los Angeles to Salvadoran communities on the US East Coast and to jails in El Salvador.
It is the first time the film will show in Texas, which has dealt with its share of MS-13 violence.They have the reputation for chopping off rivals' fingers with machetes and killing suspected informants, including a pregnant 17-year-old.
Their tattoos often stretch across their faces, arms and chests, giving them away as Mara Salvatrucha's members.
Fuchs examines what led Central American youngsters fleeing violence in their homelands to join the gang. How did a group of neighborhood cliques of Salvadorans in Los Angeles gain strength to become an international gang with tens of thousands of members?
"You have to go back to the civil war to understand: Why was this society so violent?" Fuchs said.
Even before its release, Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) a new movie about a police war against Brazil's criminal gangs has become an underground hit and caused controversy, including a police effort to block its screening.
Tropa de Elite, by Brazilian director Jose Padilha, will premiere at this week's Rio Film Festival. It is the latest in a string of acclaimed homegrown movies showing Brazil's ugly side that includes the Oscar-nominated City of God about gangs in a Rio slum.
Tropa de Elite is a fictional look at police work in Rio.
Two honest cops leave the underpaid, poorly equipped and corrupt general police force to join the Special Operations Battalion, whose officers are depicted as incorruptible and highly trained but who torture suspects for information and then shoot them.
The film is already a hit in Brazil after a copy was stolen during post-production and pirated.
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