ALUMNI

MPA Graduate Exposes Sex Trafficking

Gayle Ferraro MPA 1999 was so terrified when she was shooting her second film, Anonymously Yours, that every night, before going to bed, she locked the film canisters in a safe at her host’s house in Burma.

“It was a complete clandestine operation,” Ferraro said at the screening of the film at the Kennedy School in March. “We had hot stuff and we knew that if we got caught with it, we’d be in trouble.”

The “hot stuff” is the film’s subject: the illegal trafficking of young girls and women in the sex industry. Shot with hidden digital cameras, the film takes a candid look at the institution, which enslaves an estimated 40 million girls and women worldwide and has been called “the fastest growing industry on earth” by the United Nations.

In Burma, where Ferraro and her crew were filming, the country has been under military rule since the early 1960s. Speaking in public to the women that she interviewed was forbidden. All names are pseudonyms. This led, in part, to the naming of the film.

“Everything about the film is anonymous. I left the girls back there as anonymous. Those who smuggled out the tapes remain anonymous. The sex is anonymous. I had to be anonymous,” Ferraro said.

The film’s main focus is “ZuZu,” a 17-year-old who had been sold into prostitution when she was 10 — an age, Ferraro explained, that is increasingly becoming more common as the threat of AIDS makes younger girls more desirable. ZuZu tells stories about her experiences — stories that are shocking and sad. She also explains the circumstances that led ZuZu’s family to sell her, what Ferraro calls “motives rooted in human needs” — poverty and a lack of education. At the end of the film, as she wonders what will become of her, ZuZu becomes self-conscious.

“I wonder what English-speaking people will think of this,” she says, looking at the camera and wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Please don’t think badly of me.”

To learn more about Ferraro’s films, go to www.aerial-productions.com/.