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FILM: Music for a New Abolitionist Movement

Amanda Bransford

NEW YORK, Aug 4 2010 (IPS) - Musician Justin Dillon had been reading about human trafficking before he went on tour to Eastern Europe. In Russia, his young female translator told him about offers she was receiving to move west for jobs that seemed too good to be true – and with no paperwork to back them up.

Having learned about trafficking and modern-day slavery, Dillon warned her that something wasn’t right about these offers. He also realised how easily people with small resources and big dreams are tricked into giving up their freedom, and how easily these crimes take place in plain sight without people recognising what is happening.

Dillon created the documentary and musical performance film Call + Response, which screened Wednesday at Long Island University in a presentation by the Partnership to Eradicate Human Trafficking, to enable more people to see the problem.

“You need to have the correct lens to see it because it isn’t what we think of as slavery – it’s not African slaves in chains like in the American south,” Dillon told IPS. “It’s the same degree of oppression, but it looks different.”

Though victims may go willingly with a trafficker instead of being kidnapped, they end up literally as slaves.

They may have their passports taken away, or be drugged, beaten, or raped. They may be physically confined or held in debt bondage or their families threatened.

Instead of the jobs and educations they were promised, they are forced to work as labourers or prostitutes, without compensation.

Though slavery is illegal internationally, many slaves have learned to distrust police and don’t know how or whom to ask for help. And though they may live right alongside caring people in any country in the world, the truth of their situation goes unnoticed.

“Where the traffickers win is in that grey area,” said Dillon. “Is it immigration, or is it human trafficking? Is it prostitution, or is it child sex tourism? That place where definitions aren’t quite as defined – that’s where there’s money to be made.”

And the money to be made is vast. Though slaves are worth far less today than they were during legal slavery in today’s currency, due to sheer volume, trafficking is an incredibly lucrative enterprise. According to research by the Call + Response team, slave traders made more money in 2009 than Google, Nike, and Starbucks combined.

Dillon was overwhelmed by a desire to help end the suffering of slaves, and with anger at those who would exploit people so terribly.

He decided that the most effective response he could give would be through what he knows best – music. “I know who I am and I need to act out of who I am, from the inside out,” he said. “I couldn’t wait for someone to give me something to do. I just needed to start moving.”

He began holding benefit concerts and donating the money to anti-trafficking organisations. Wanting to do something bigger, he contacted fellow musicians and asked them to perform in Call + Response, which he wrote, directed, and produced, and which has screened all over the world.

The film features information about trafficking and slavery alongside performances by musicians, including Talib Kweli, Imogen Heap, Cold War Kids, and Natasha Bedingfield, as well as original songs by Dillon. “The music creates the mood and the moments of the story,” said Dillon. “It’s not necessarily a literal interpretation, but an emotional one.”

Dillon got other musicians interested by pointing out the link between music and slavery, which Princeton University professor Cornel West, a prominent African American intellectual and proponent of racial justice, illuminates in interviews with Dillon in the film.

“If it weren’t for the slave music that came out of the fields,” Dillon told IPS, “we musicians today wouldn’t have jobs. Where are the origins of our music? Oppression, redemption; tension, release. Before slavery in America, we really didn’t have the verse and chorus mode that we have today.”

As West and Dillon discuss in the film, slaves, who may have nothing but their bodies and their voices, learn to use body and voice in innovative ways, tying music to the slave experience. Music has also been tied to movements for social change, like the U.S. Civil Rights movement. “There’s never been a movement in history that didn’t have musicians there singing about it,” said Dillon.

Dillon hopes that musicians can use both their art and their celebrity to call attention to a problem that can be addressed if ordinary people get involved. “The film is the call,” said Dillon. “And the response is what people do with it.”

The film’s website helps people to arrange screenings of their own, and offers viewers platforms to contact public officials and to donate money to relevant organisations.

It also alerts them of consumer advocacy that allows anyone to work against trafficking. Many products contain elements made by slaves, and consumers have a great power to fight slavery by refusing to buy slave-produced products as a group.

“People,” said Dillon, “have far more power to affect change than they think they do.”