USA / Burma / Thailand,
1998, 50 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Ellen Bruno
- prod
-
Ellen Bruno
- cam
-
Ellen Bruno
- editor
-
Ellen Bruno
- source
-
Ellen Bruno, 3447 25th St., San Francisco, CA 94110. FAX: 415- 641-9104
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Bay Area Film & Video: Documentary
-
COMMENTS
Screened with 24 Girls.
OTHER
Ellen Bruno’s previous film, Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy (SFIFF 1994), was a powerful, engrossing look at four Tibetan nuns caught against a backdrop of political repression. In the heart-wrenching Sacrifice, Bruno unveils a world of economic and sexual tyranny as she explores the lives of young Burmese women, most under the age of 15, sold into prostitution in Thailand. Fleeing their homeland because of government oppression and corruption and held captive until they pay mythical “debts” to their captors, they find only a world of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Clandestine interviews with the women are interspersed with hallucinatory, radiant images of countrysides, villages and families. Blades of grass flickering in the night moon, children playing in streets, figures dancing in candlelight—serene images of hope and home fuse with painful words of abuse and fear, achieving a poetic resonance of pain, loss and rage. Sacrifice ultimately becomes more than a document of sacrificed, stolen lives and the tragic reality of their brutalization; its true effect lies in its unspoken emotion, where no perfunctory summary exists, where, seeping through the frames, lies the unavoidable cruelty of a world of exploitation.
—Jason Sanders
FACTOID #210
When Ginger Rogers appeared for a tribute at the SFIFF in 1984 (’sporting hair with the color and richness of whipped butter,’ wrote the Examiner), she shocked the packed Castro Theatre crowd at her 1984 tribute when she griped, ’The filthy mouths we’re hearing in films today’I won’t pay to see these movies. I’d rather stay home and make jam.’
