Rooting For Kari

There's a good reason for readers of this blog to pay attention to the Academy Awards this year, at least the short film category: one of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Film is KARI, a 17-minute offering by writer-director-producer Gregg Helvey on modern-day slavery in India.

At the film's official website, Helvey reveals some behind-the-scenes information on the origin of the project, and the the two-and-a-half years' work that went in to its creation:

After I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2001, I had a brief stint as a National Geographic Traveler, where I first learned that slavery still exists. The editor I was working for was starting a nonprofit targeting sex slavery in Eastern Europe. It blew my mind to hear the horrific stories of young women being sold into slavery. As I dug into research, I learned that the most prevalent yet least-known form of modern-day slavery is bonded labor. The majority of films I had seen exposed sex slavery and human trafficking, but there are very little on bonded labor. I read about some brick kilns in India and Pakistan where entire families are forced to make bricks in order to pay off “loans” they are tricked into taking. The slaves are forced to work through intimidation or violence and, if they attempt to escape, they are often beaten and then charged for the price of their bandages. If they do escape, then the loan givers will force extended family members to work in their relative’s stead. Often, the victims are both illiterate and innumerate, thus making it difficult to fully understand their own situation. These bogus loans can be passed down through generations, resulting in families who have only ever known a life of forced labor.

Hopefully, even if it doesn't win, the very nomination and mention during the high-profile Academy Awards will ensure greater exposure of the film, and especially of its subject matter.

The film is playing this week at Arizona's Sedona Film Festival, and at San Jose California's Cinequest Film Festival. In March the film will be screened at Nebraska's Omaha Film Festival,
San Francisco's Asian American Film Festival, and Fort Wayne Indiana's Winsong Pictures Film Festival.

(What, I wonder, does it say about our 500+ cable channel culture, that short films, Academy Award-nominated or otherwise, have so little market that they must make the rounds of film festivals in search of their audience?)

A big vote of thanks to the persevering Gregg Helvey for his work in bringing attention to the evil of modern-day slavery.

For more background on the cruelty of South-Asia's back-breaking brick-making industry, see this 2007 report by the New York Times.

For a recent story on the desperate measures kiln-workers in neighboring Pakistan are resorting to in order to escape the brick-making industry, read this harrowing report from last December.