Interview with Call & Response‘s Justin Dillon: ‘There’s so much more beneath the surface’
by Bambi Weavil
Recently in October, we interviewed Director Justin Dillon from Call & Response, the feature rockumentary exposing the truth about modern day slavery:
BW: What drove you to create the movie Call + Response?
Justin: The issue that came in the full focus for me when I was traveling abroad and I learned about the issue [of slavery] by reading a couple of newspaper articles here in the States, particularly a New York Times Magazine Article called “The Girls Next Door.” It talked about this cartel that was luring young girls and women from Eastern countries with opportunities to be waitresses, or even something glamorous like being a model in the West. They would set up modeling agencies in these countries, pay their way to the West, get their passport, everything they’d need; then they would force them through Mexico City “on their way to the States” and there the cartel would pick them up from the airport and take them to a brothel and break their will sexually.
After they have been properly broken, then they would be trafficked into the United States and put into brothels. It’s so unbelievable, it sounded like a movie. Fast-forward three months later, I was in Russia playing music and talking to people and there were all these girls around telling me the same stories about getting all these offers to come to the West to be a model. I started telling them, ‘Do you guys know about human trafficking? Do you know what’s going on?’ None of them would believe me, and that’s what was so disheartening. I told these girls exactly what was going on, but they weren’t having it.
BW: Why do you think the media and the government haven’t covered it more extensively? To me, this is something that should be on the news everyday…. To me it’s such a human rights violation.
J: My hope is we’re going to see more [media coverage]. It’s not a war, it’s not a country, it’s not even a disease, it’s human activity that you’re trying to break. Why hasn’t the media picked up on it? I don’t know. Why hasn’t the government done more? My take on it is that it doesn’t have a proper box to fit in yet. That’s not a good enough excuse, as far as elicit trades go. You’ve got guns, you’ve got drugs; the selling of human beings is way more [devastating] than the selling of guns. It’s [estimated to happen to] 32 billion people. And that’s low, [because] those are the estimates based onactual reporting. There’s so much more beneath the surface, so the reality is it rivals drugs as far as profitability margins. One of the questions I asked in DC to the Ambassador of the State Department is why we have a drug czar but not a [human] trafficking czar? Isn’t that as important? The reality is the State Department has an office to combat human trafficking but it’s very small. It looks like the offices of The X-Files, it’s in a basement. There’s not a lot of pressure put on it so until the issue becomes an electable issue, or until it becomes a consumer choice from a business standpoint, it’s going to be hard for businesses and governments to fit it in. The media tends to always go towards like the Nancy Grace thing, and the reality is, these aren’t just young blonde girls being trafficked. These are kids, these are men, these are women. Half of the victims of human trafficking are for labor slavery, which could be something as unsexy as charcoal plants or sugar or rice. That’s not as appealing as young girls being lured into the sex industry. The media has a long way to go to start telling the correct story, because it tends to throw it in either the immigration category or prostitution category, when really it’s in a category that has existed throughout all time: Slavery.
BW: I know you’ve gotten interviewed by CNN. Has CNN expressed any interest in covering more stories on human trafficking?
J: The FBI had a huge bust this weekend, hundreds and hundreds of human trafficking victims were rescued at brothels and massage parlors. Here’s the thing that’s jacked up: You’ve got massage parlors in every city in the country and 80% of them are being run as brothels. Here in San Francisco, I’ve gone undercover, and these girls had no idea where they were. We asked specific questions about how long have you been here, [they’d say] two years. ‘Do you know where the Golden Gate Bridge is?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you know where Starbucks is?’ ‘No.’ These women are clearly being moved around. First of all it’s clearly prostitution, second of all, they are in indentured servitude [because their captors say] ‘We paid you to come over here and you have to work this off.’ Either way it’s a company-store mentality, which means your rent, your food, your clothes, everything will always be more than what you can earn as a prostitute. At the bottom level you’d always be in an indentured servitude situation, which is still coerced, and at the top level you could have full-on slavery: ’You were brought here, you were tricked, you were duped.’
We have this wide category that fits inside the definition of slavery which is what my film says. It says, look, here is the working definition of slavery: it’s being forced to work without pay under the threat of violence, being somehow economically exploited, and you can’t walk away from it. If you fit anywhere in that, it’s slavery. That could be tomato fields in Florida or that could be massage parlors in San Francisco. That’s slavery.
Laws all around the world are against slavery, including in America.
BW: Right, this is being overlooked in general, and I hate the word tolerated, but I would say tolerated too…
J: Or dismissed, or not looked at. It’s kind of a ‘Where’s Waldo’ thing, when you do get media attention it’s ‘Oh my god, where are they at?’ We have to have more sustained attention to this, not just ‘Let’s go shut down a massage parlor’ or ‘Let’s go stop eating in Indian food restaurants’. It’s not really about that. It’s about sustained attention to this [issue]. You’re not just going to free everyone all at once. It’s a business. It’s a very, very profitable business and people are protective of their businesses. They are already thinking of how we’re going to react to it.
BW: What was the most surprising thing for you to learn making this movie?
J: I’m far from an expert, that’s why I went to the experts. I went to the people that I knew could teach me, and my point of view in the film is as a musician trying to discover how human trafficking and slavery touches my life. As a musician, I find it touches the very thing that I live and breathe: Music. We wouldn’t have popular music without the original human trafficking victims [bringing] music here 150 years ago. On a personal level, learning how slavery touches not just the music I listen to, but the carpets I walk on, the clothes I wear, the food I eat, and the cars I drive.
It’s also surprising how few people know about it. There’s no guilt in [not knowing about modern day slavery]. The thing we have to work against here in the States is we think the history of slavery is relegated to our 8th grade history books. It’s like ‘Didn’t we take care of that?’ And that was me a couple of years ago. ‘Yeah I thought we knocked that out 150 years ago.’ It’s worse now then ever before, if you truly follow the definition.
BW: Where do the proceeds go? To specific non-profits? How is that set up?
J: Our desire as human beings is to connect to the story, an important story, so I don’t want to take the story out of the hands of the people who made it or who went to see it and throw it somewhere else. We’re basically saying everyone needs to respond to this. Sometimes we’re needing help finding a response, so the website was built so that people can find a place to donate to, which we’re sponsoring grassroots projects all over the world. Everybody has $5 and five minutes, don’t feel like you have to change your life to change this issue, you can make it part of your life. That is what we’re asking. Don’t change your life, make it part of your life. Very few people are going to change their lives for an issue; it’s just not feasible. I’d rather get a million people changing a little bit of their lives than a 100 people completely changing their lives.
BW: How is the open source activism going?
J: Yeah, when do you watch a film where someone says to turn your phone on during the middle of the film? We’re having people turn their phones on during the film in the theatre, texting right there and participating. [During the] first week, 6,000 people were participating. It’s amazing. They’re telling all their friends to go see it in different cities when it comes to them. We’re kind of like the Grateful Dead of film; we’re roving, finding our markets anywhere we go. In most markets, we’re outperforming major films,because it gets huge grassroots support. People are doing it inside this theatre and all these platforms on Call + Response. We built a platform and people are using it. [We have] consumer initiative platforms where open letters are being set to all these producers to get them to pay attention to this issue. Thousands of letters were being sent out the first week. Major producers like Gap and Burberry immediately said, ‘Okay we’re in, let’s have a discussion and let’s continue work on this.’ That doesn’t happen everyday. If you get a thousand people sending the same letter to Gap, people are going to pay attention. That, to me, is the power of critical mass. Things are getting done.
BW: Thank you for your time Justin and the incredible movie you’ve put together with the solid grassroots effort. For more information on Call + Response please visit www.callandresponse.com.
Related posts:
RSS
Newsletter
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
MySpace
YouTube
