page_title: Not My Life
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Not My Life / Production / Background
caption_attribution_description: Antonio Maria Costa Deutsch: UN-Vizegeneralsekretär Antonio Maria Costa am Red Carpet zu den Women’s World Awards 2009 in der Wiener Stadthalle (Wien, Österreich). English: Antonio Maria Costa, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, at the Women's World Award 2009 (Wiener Stadthalle, Vienna, Austria).
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: The project that became Not My Life was initiated by the executive director of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, who wanted to commission a film that would "bring the issue of modern slavery to the attention of public opinion, globally—especially the well-meaning, law-abiding and God-fearing people who do not believe something so horrible is happening in their own neighborhood." With this goal in mind, Costa approached Worldwide Documentaries, an East Bloomfield, New York-based organization that had produced two films with which he was familiar: The Cry of Reason, which documents internal resistance to South African apartheid by way of Beyers Naudé's story; and A Closer Walk, which is about the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS. Costa e-mailed Bilheimer, Director of Worldwide Documentaries, asking him to create the film he envisioned. Costa said that he choose Bilheimer because the director had developed a "solid reputation [for] addressing difficult topics... combining artistic talent, a philosophical view about development and a humanitarian sentiment about what to do about the issues."
  Bilheimer accepted Costa's proposition, and subsequently wrote, produced, and directed Not My Life as an independent film. Bilheimer, who had received an Academy Award nomination for The Cry of Reason, said that "the unrelenting, unpunished, and craven exploitation of millions of human beings for labor, sex, and hundreds of sub-categories thereof is simply the most appalling and damaging expression of so-called human civilization we have ever seen." Bilheimer's wife, Heidi Ostertag, is Worldwide Documentaries' Senior Producer, and she co-produced Not My Life with him. She said that she found making a film about human trafficking difficult because "people do not want to talk about this issue." Bilheimer found that the connections he had made during the production of A Closer Walk were also useful when producing Not My Life because the poor and the outcast are at the greatest risk of both HIV/AIDS and human trafficking; there is, for this reason, much overlap between the groups victimized by these two afflictions. Bilheimer attempted to fashion the film in such a way that every part of it would illustrate a statement made by Abraham Lincoln: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."
  When making this film, Bilheimer held that a contemporary abolitionist movement did not yet exist. He described his purpose in creating the film as to raise awareness and initiate such a movement. He also wished to communicate to his audiences that not all human trafficking is sexual. Traffickers "commit unspeakable, wanton acts of violence against their fellow human beings," he said, "and are rarely punished for their crimes." Production of Not My Life was supported by the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT), UNICEF, and UNODC, providing Worldwide Documentaries with $1 million in funding secured by Costa.
caption: Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, asked Robert Bilheimer to make Not My Life.
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