Brief Explanation

By leveraging on the “mannequin challenge” viral video trend on social media, we created a webfilm that took viewers on a tour of a brothel selling sex with children. The film showed “clients” with helpless underage sex workers frozen in time, which conveyed the key message of stopping perpetrators in their tracks to put child sexual exploitation at a standstill. The film led to an online petition for harsher laws in the prosecution of grooming, trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Execution

We spoke to social activists to get a sense of a child brothel would look like. With this visual description in mind, we visited low budget backpacker inns within the vicinity of where these brothels are known to be. With guidance from these activists, furnitures were removed, curtains replaced doors and talcum powder and tissue paper were placed on tables. These are low cost brothels are usually catered to street people and migrant workers, so we did street casting. As for the kids, we casted mixed-race people because the victims were migrant children. For their clothes, we got them from second hand thrift shops. We shot relying on mainly tungsten lighting and kept it as raw as possible to give it a low budget feeling believing that all these little things will create the sort of mood that's befitting the heavy subject matter.