Trade

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399095/
Make a movie for an estimated sum of $12 MILLIONS and add some of the most horrific and most important issues of today and the opening weekend the movie will have a gross intect of only $215.000 after a month.. is this how sick/naive the world is? Or is the movie asking to many questions about a topic that is so scary that people avoided it?

Adriana (Paulina Gaitán) is a young girl living in Mexico city with her family, infact she has just turned 13 and gets a bike from her brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos) as a birthday present. Their mother suspects that Jorge has stolen the bike, Jorge leaves after an arguement to join his friends. Adriana however, happy for the present sneaks out the other day with her bike, a car follows her, some russians kidnapp her - soon even Adriana is one of many many sextraffic victims.

The kidnapping of Adriana












Veronika(Alicja Bachleda-Curuś) a polish girl, arrives in Mexico City at the same time as the kidnapping of Adriana. She meets a woman and some men at the airport, Veronika seems a bit nervous meeting them, the intention is as I see it that we are made to believe she is an illegal imigrant. The men sets her up outside of the airport and take her away in their van.
She is being taken to an hideout where she will be beaten and raped.

Jorge and his friends manage to spot the kidnappers and Jorge sets out after them. The kidnapping of his sister seems not to have been an act of random, infact this is an organized well founded gang who have taken more children together with Adriana. Jorge later on meet Ray (Kevin Kline) who works as a federal investigator, now they both have to find Adriana before she is sold over the internet to some pedophile.

Trade is a extremely important movie based on Peter Landesman's
Story "The Girls Next Door" from NY Times about sextrafficking.
Mang shan a.k.a. Blind Mountain, a review of that will be posted soon also,
touches upon the same dark issues.
Trade however is more told, written, shot and acted as Steven Soderberghs
oscarwinning movie about the drug trafficking between Mexico and US;
Traffic. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/
They both uses the same "lightbrown layer/filter" in various scenes and in all honesty; Trade outnumbers Traffic completly.

So, does Trade handle this issue well?
The acting is really good by everyone in the cast, maby mostly from Kevin Kline, Cesar Ramos and Alicja Bachleda-Curuś.
It´s after all not an topic that is easy to handle but the director Marco Kreuzpaintner and the screenwriter Jose Rivera has done a great job to make this movie. For the topic and for trying to raise the awerness of all this, it might be together with Mang shan some of the most important movies in the last decade.

Official trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdeHCL_DO5E

Official site
http://www.tradethemovie.com/

More on Peter Landesman´s article
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html?pagewanted=1

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- You pay for this. I make sure.
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- First fuck is here.
- Sorry?
- You gonna fuck the little virgin right here.
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Adriana & Veronika