Anonymously Yours

dir. Ferraro

Opens Fri Dec 5

Hollywood Theater

In 1999, documentarian Gayle Ferraro and a crew of three smuggled digital video cameras into the dictatorship of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Their mission was to document the brutal sex trade that plagues Southeast Asia, ripping women from their homes, often against their will, and the cycle of poverty that perpetuates it. Posing as tourists, the crew ventured into areas forbidden to foreigners to talk with women working the streets; with the help of a Burmese social worker, they filmed clandestine interviews with young women whose whole lives have been filled with pain, rape, prostitution, and poverty. Then, risking grave punishment, another person smuggled the tapes out. The result is Anonymously Yours.

For the most part, the film is horrifying, as the interviewed women describe their lives with great candidness and incredible bravery. And yet, it’s impossible to turn away from these women. The film is an eye-opening journalistic document and, hopefully, will be a catalyst for change and improvement of the lives of women who are essentially sex slaves.

Partly consisting of interviews and intermittent shots of the colorful landscape of rural and urban Myanmar, the film’s honesty and sensitivity for its subjects’ situations sheds a light on how exploitative other documents of Asian sex workers have been, such as Reagan Louie’s photographs. Anonymously Yours never exploits to its own ends, nor does it make character judgments, nor does it necessarily venture to explain the socioeconomic conditions which keep the demand so high for prostitutes, some as young as eight years old. (Although it’s understood poverty and an increasing presence of Western businessmen keep the trade alive.) It is stark, bleak testimonial after testimonial, women detailing the job that destroys their lives and will, but from which they have no exit.

The girl whose narrative threads the film together, “ZuZu,” is 17; with a bout of tuberculosis she looks 12 in physical stature, but the pain in her eyes gives her an ageless weariness. She was first raped at 10, tricked by a friend’s stepfather and sold into prostitution. After an abortion, she was able to quit for a time, until her aunt tricked her back into it, for the money. It goes on like that–a cycle of tragedy that needs to be heard.