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.

Child Chained In Plain Sight, Rescued From Delhi Restaurant

India: A child trafficked from his native village of Sehjana Kaparanda in the Katihar district of Bihar has been rescued from two months of being kept shackled to his post in a Delhi roadside restaurant.

The boy's father had been searching for his missing boy for weeks, having learned that a fellow villager had trafficked the child to India's capital city, Delhi. Having come so close, he was still far from finding, and rescuing, his son, as the local bureaucracy paid little attention to his pleas for assistance, sending him on a fruitless merry-go-round of visits to police station after police station. It's hard to imagine the degree of despair and grief that must have afflicted the father at this time; even after receiving a tip on the restaurant holding his son captive, he was not able to melt the government's icebound bureaucratic indifference. His son remained in chains.

Thankfully, the case came to the attention of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) ["Save The Childhood Movement"], a private Indian organization dedicated to freeing India's children from bonded labor. The BBA have rescued over 70,000 children from slavery since the group's founding in the 1980s. Their experience allowed them to navigate the sea of red tape and got the father's complaint filed with the appropriate child labor agency, resulting in a rescue operation mounted against the restaurant and its heartless owner.

The indifference met by the desperate father is nothing compared to what the son witnessed during his captivity:

“I was working in this Dhaba for last 3 months. One day, he accused me of stealing Rs. 50,000 from his home and started torturing me physically. A fortnight ago, he decided to tether me with iron chains. I could move in the radius of one metre only and worked for more than 15 hours a day without any protection from the cold weather. Police personnel kept coming to the Dhaba and mocked at me. There is a mosque just opposite, even the people saw me like this everyday after their morning and evening prayers. Nobody came for my rescue”.

BBA's Chairperson, Professor Rama Shankar Chaurasia, draws a sobering conclusion from the child's rescue:

“A child found chained in the heart of national capital is a serious issue. It goes on to show how little concern we have for children of our society..."

It staggers the imagination to think that police officers in India's capital city can see a child wearing these shackles, and their reaction is... to mock him??

[Image courtesy of BBA's news report on the story]

[UPDATE: Some background to the rampant corruption stalling efforts to free India's slaves provided by Youngbee Kim at the Northfolk Human Rights Examiner]