page_title: Not My Life
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Not My Life / Reception
caption_attribution_description: USAID Human Trafficking Symposium, Sept. 16, 2009 -- Actress and UNICEF Ambassador Lucy Liu spoke out against human trafficking and lauded USAID efforts to increase awareness. YouTube Interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd9xkPyGaCo
context_page_description: Not My Life is a 2011 American independent documentary film about human trafficking and contemporary slavery. The film was written, produced, and directed by Robert Bilheimer, who had been asked to make the film by Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Bilheimer planned Not My Life as the second installment in a trilogy, the first being A Closer Walk and the third being the unproduced Take Me Home. The title Not My Life came from a June 2009 interview with Molly Melching, founder of Tostan, who said that many people deny the reality of contemporary slavery because it is an uncomfortable truth, saying, "No, this is not my life."
  Filming of Not My Life took four years to complete, and documented human trafficking in 13 countries: Albania, Brazil, Cambodia, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Italy, Nepal, Romania, Senegal, Uganda, and the United States. The first and last scenes of the film take place in Ghana, and show children who are forced to fish in Lake Volta for 14 hours a day. The film also depicts sex trafficking victims, some of whom are only five or six years old.
context_section_description: At the USAID preview screening, actress Lucy Liu, who has worked with MTV EXIT and produced the documentary film Redlight, said that people who watch Not My Life "will be shocked to find [human trafficking] is happening in America"; she said that there were 80,000 women being sexually assaulted daily and she called human trafficking the "cannibalization of the planet's youth." According to UN.GIFT, before Not My Life, there was "no single communication tool that effectively depict[ed] the problem as a whole for a mass audience." Susan Bissell, UNICEF's Child Protection Section chief, agreed with this assertion, and said that the film "takes a close look at the underlying causality that so many other filmmakers have missed [and] it will change the way we see our lives, in some very fundamental ways." She also said that Not My Life is an important documentary because it brings attention to underreported forms of abuse. A reviewer from Medical News Today praised the film for "raising awareness and speaking about taboo subjects," arguing that these activities "are critical to empower families, communities, and governments to speak out honestly and take action against abuses."
  Lucy Popescu of CineVue called the film "a powerful indictment of the global trade in human beings and the abuse of vulnerable people," but criticized the film for focusing on human trafficking victims, arguing that the perpetrators should have been dealt with more prominently. She commended Bilheimer on the few interviews with traffickers that he did include, but she condemned as inadequate the "only passing reference to the thousands of men who engage in sexual tourism, like those who travel to Cambodia to 'buy' traumatized children who they can then abuse for weeks at a time." Popescu also called the film "simplistic", arguing that it should have more clearly expressed that sex trafficking victims are not able to provide legitimate consent for sexual activity because they are afraid that their lives might be in danger if they do not comply. John Rash of the Star Tribune called the film "a cacophony of concerned voices speaking about a modern-day scourge." Rash praised the film for its global scope, but suggested that this geographical breadth allows American audiences to ignore the fact that the trafficking of children is prevalent in the United States and not just in other countries.
  Not My Life was named Best World Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival in September 2012. Nancy Keefe Rhodes of Stone Canoe called it a "highly-distilled ... remarkable film," describing Bilheimer as "committed to strong story-telling and film-as-craft." She commends Bilheimer on alternating between American sequences and scenes in other countries, allowing "the experiences of young women with whom an American audience may more readily identify [to] become one among many woven into the fabric of global trafficking." Tripurari Sharan, Director General of DD, said that his organization was pleased to air the film and hoped that doing so would bring about greater awareness across India about human trafficking in the country. He called the film "both an eye-opener and a profoundly moving call to action".
caption: Actress Lucy Liu spoke at the United States Agency for International Development preview screening of Not My Life, saying that 80,000 women are victims of sexual assault every day.
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