Trade is about sex trafficking. Specifically, thugs
kidnapping women and children, smuggling them across borders, and
selling them in an online auction to become sex slaves. Yikes.
Surprisingly, Trade isn’t nearly as disturbing as it could
have been. Sure, there were terrified kids imprisoned in dank
underground cells, implied sex abuse, and one blatant (though not
nearly as gratuitous as it could have been) rape scene. Those elements,
however, are purposeful, and drive the film’s point home—sex
trafficking is real, it’s horrific, and it affects innocent people.
It’s also flourishing—the film’s based on a New York Times
Magazine piece that exposed the underbelly of international human
trafficking, which drags up to 20,000 victims into the US each
year.
Yet few victims have a heroic brother like Trade‘s Jorge
(Cesar Ramos), who goes on a quest to save his 13-year-old sister
Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) after she’s kidnapped on the streets of Mexico
City. He sneaks across the border, and has a run-in with a Texas cop
(Kevin Kline), and the two end up tracking down Adriana in the hopes of
rescuing her before she’s ultimately sold for tens of thousands of
dollars. Meanwhile, Adriana befriends Veronica (Alicja Bachleda-Curus),
a young Polish woman who’s also been kidnapped—who puts her own
life on the line to protect the younger kids.
The parallels between Trade and Traffic—a
similar exposé/drama on drug trafficking—are obvious, and
the films’ stark cinematography styles are strikingly similar. But
while Traffic explored territory that most Americans are at
least vaguely aware of—duh, there’s a drug war—Trade succeeds at covering new, terrifying ground. Trade might not be
as harrowing as it could have been, and perhaps should be—but the
reality it portrays certainly is.