The official website for The Price of Sex is here. It provides this summary:
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.
This article reports:
… Chakarova posed as a prostitute and spent time building relationships with men who visited brothels on a regular basis. She had to trust them in order to gain access to infamous red light areas such as Aksaray. She put herself in danger but says posing as a prostitute enabled her to better understand the conditions girls endure.
Her investigation also found that many women are complicit in the trafficking.
Chakarova said: “They become pimps, madams and traffickers. The longer they have been trafficked, the more likely it is for them to become recruiters. They go back to their villages and entice young women to come with them.”
Chakarova’s project evolved from a photo project to multimedia and then to a full-length documentary. Since The Price of Sex was premiered at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival, it has been a sell-out in the US and abroad.
In addition to public screenings, the film was used by the FBI to help train police in Serbia, where trafficking is escalating.
The Price of Sex was made through a collaboration with the Centre for Investigative Reporting in California.
The film won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking and the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. ….
