page_title: Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
section_title: Re-enactments and live footage
hierarchical_section_title: Nefarious: Merchant of Souls / Contents / Re-enactments and live footage
caption_attribution_description: English: A photograph of the production of the film Nefarious: Merchant of Souls. Benjamin Nolot is leftmost and Matthew Dickey is second from the left.
context_page_description: Nefarious: Merchant of Souls is a 2011 American documentary film about modern human trafficking, specifically sexual slavery. Presented from a Christian worldview, Nefarious covers human trafficking in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia, alternating interviews with re-enactments. Victims of trafficking talk about having been the objects of physical abuse and attempted murder. Several former prostitutes talk about their conversion to Christianity, escape from sexual oppression, and subsequent education or marriage. The film ends with the assertion that only Jesus can completely heal people from the horrors of sexual slavery.
  Nefarious was written, directed, produced and narrated by Benjamin Nolot, founder and president of Exodus Cry, the film's distributor. Nolot, who travelled to 19 countries to collect the film's content, said that the purpose of the film is "to draw people's attention to the issue, but also to inspire them in terms of what they can be doing … to take a stand against this injustice." The film was officially released on July 27, 2011, with individual grassroots screenings also taking place.
context_section_description: Nefarious covers human trafficking in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Interviews are interspersed with re-enactments. The film opens with a re-enactment of a girl being kidnapped by organized criminals. She is confined with other girls in a dark room, lit by a flickering lightbulb. Men order the girls to remove their clothes, and then examine them and shout commands and threats at them, causing them to cry from fear. One girl is dragged into another room. A victim of ordeals such as these, speaking in voiceover, explains that, in this situation, girls are often taken into a separate room to have their sexual performance tested. Identifying these events as taking place near Belgrade, Serbia, the film then tracks the fictional girls through Croatia to Amsterdam's red-light district De Wallen, and to sex markets in Berlin and Las Vegas. The film states that this slavery goes unnoticed in cities where prostitution is legal. Slaves are depicted in confinement, at their places of work, and as they are sold. Many of the girls are orphans, and all are either kidnapped or tricked into forced prostitution. Traffickers in the film use hard drugs, brainwashing and sexual and physical abuse to keep the girls under control.
  One of the scenes in Southeast Asia takes place near a karaoke club, and depicts groups of girls, apparently ranging in age from early to late teens, offering sexual services to customers. Benjamin Nolot interviews a police officer, who says that the bar's owner recently bought eight other similar clubs and controls around 2,000 girls. Another Southeast Asian scene shows Nolot and his crew chasing an American man out of a town where he was trying to purchase sex with a child.
caption: The film's director and producer, Benjamin Nolot (left), also served as the narrator and interviewer.
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