“It is a huge global issue, which is in every country, in every city in the world.â€
AB Wire
WASHINGTON, DC: After being riveted by the novel “Sold” nine years ago, Jane Charles knew that the story was one that needed to be shared with as many audiences as possible. Thus, when director Jeffrey D. Brown asked her to serve as producer for a film adaptation, she leapt at the opportunity. Speaking to the American Bazaar during the Washington, DC, premiere of the film at George Washington University on April 21, Charles described her reaction to the narrative and explained why adapting the film became so important to her. Here are edited excerpts:
How did you select this particular topic and issue?
Well, I got a call from Jeffrey Brown, the director, and he said: “I read this book. You need to read this. I think you would really resonate with this subject matter.†And so I read the book, the novel “Sold,†which is translated into 32 languages globally. It’s a young adult novel by Patricia McCormick. I read it in a day and cried and I had no idea about this issue, or at least the enormity of this issue in the world at that point and [it] shattered me. And I called Jeffrey back and I said whatever I can do to help make this film, I am in; and that was 9 years ago.
It took you many years to start the work…
Well, we read the book, and making film is sometimes a long process. I think the average is about 5 years for feature films. We had a script –we started with a pretty good script. Jo Kwong [Joseph Kwong, writer/co-producer, “Sold”] wrote the bones of it. And then Jeffrey and I started doing trips to India [and] Nepal because we really wanted it to be authentic. We wanted the story to [be authentic to] everyone who has been to India and Nepal; to people who were involved in this issue and have been on the front lines and have been in brothel areas; and have seen and heard survivor stories to really feel that we got it right. And so we went and we did, I think, 6 trips to India and Nepal before we even made the film. And during that time, this script was more black and white. At the beginning the greys came in; the characters were developed. Jeffrey wrote all the subsequent drafts of the script and really brought in a lot of the authenticity and a lot of real stories that we heard while we were in India and Nepal.
When you meet these survivors, when you meet these girls that have been held in brothels and are now free, you never forget that. And, it stays with you. And when we came home from those trips, we were urgent to get this film made; because we thought we have to do something right away. Â We have to get this film out, so that people know about this issue and what we found is that as we were talking about the issue as we were raising funds, as we were writing new drafts of the script, we were teaching people about the issue of human trafficking and we were learning more every day about the issue and so that brought so much more to the project. And even though it took a long time, that time broadened our reach. It helped build our reach of the film. It helped build our audience and it helped to inform us on a very deep level about the issue.
Was it an educational experience for you?
Absolutely! My first trip to India was in 1993. When I first went to India, the sights the sounds and everything is so overwhelming and you see so many different things. It takes about, for me it took about two weeks, the first time I was there, to really let everything in, because there is so much happening everywhere. There is so much life, so many people; the food is so different, all of those things. I was in a journey for adventure to see the country and to get to know India. When we went back there to research the story, we were in a very different place. We were in the dark underworld. This is something that when you go travel to a country you don’t look for this. It’s not what you experience when you are on an adventure. Every trip we took was to delve deeper in to this issue. We learnt so much from the people at the nonprofits in India and Nepal. We spend a lot of time with  Apne Aap,  [and] New Light. Friends of our went to Prerana …  there are so many great local grassroots organizations that are working on the front lines of this issue. We decided early-on that we didn’t want to create our own nonprofit doing work in India and Nepal. There are so many organizations already. They needed us. They needed our support, and we decided that as we release the film we would help them raise funds to scale up to do the work that they are doing, because they all need funding.
The other important piece is that everyone is working in their own way, towards this issue, which is a huge global issue, which is in every country, in every city in the world. It’s in every city, every state. It’s right here in our back yard and we realized that people had to come together.  That the governments, the businesses, the nonprofits, the citizens, everyone needed to come together to get around this issue. We knew that this film could have a large impact, could be a large entry point to the issue. So the people would at least say, “Whoa! I didn’t know this existed! Now, does it happen here,” and start asking questions. But the most important thing that people do ask is, “What can I do?” And that’s what we wanted to do. We really wanted to create a tool for change that could help end this issue and help survivors heal and rehabilitate and help prevent this issue with education. So we started something called the “Taught Not Trafficked” campaign, which was started by Childreach International because,  if you keep children in school until the age of 16, they are 80 per cent less likely to be trafficked.  And so now we have partners in this Taught Not Trafficked campaign.
All of these partners would be using this film to raise money for themselves. And that is the best part of making this film. You know, making a film is always difficult; it’s never an easy task. Making a film about a dark issue like this is very difficult. Jeffrey used to always say you live the journey of the film that you are making. And we lived a very difficult journey making this film, but we knew how important the message was. We knew that if we could get this out to millions of people and people became aware of this issue, that things will start changing, and they did even right from the beginning.
It started as a work of art, and then it became a mission and a campaign. When you started did you had any idea that it would end-up like this?
The first vision, I have to say, “No,” and I have to say, “Yes” because our hope and dream was that it would be like this. But you can never imagine exactly how it’s going to play out. And really, as film makers, our first mission was awareness. And we really always talked about this film is an awareness tool. It’s a tool for creating awareness in the world about this issue and that was our only goal to begin with. We wanted to help real children but we knew that there were other organizations that were doing the work on the ground. We never, I mean I guess I could just say, we never knew the extent of how involved we would get with the nonprofits and how involved they would get and want to use this film. We had hoped that they would want use this film and once people started seeing the film, we saw the power of it; we saw that all of the nonprofits said this the tool that we can use, we know this is something that will help to bring awareness. And help us do our jobs better. We knew we have done our job. We knew we had done a good job.
Watch the interview: