Human trafficking has always been a popular topic in cinema, with the film The Silent Traffic in Soulspromoting reform as early as 1913. Since then the idea of human trafficking has been revised at various times and within various contexts, as in the past decade, where the rise in migration and the demise of national borders have turned human traffic into one of the dominant narratives of contemporary cinema. This study focuses on the current cycle of films that play upon trafficking anxieties. Like their subject, these essays are transnational in nature, reflecting on films that depict white slavery, drug trafficking, and undocumented labor. The volume considers films by such internationally renowned directors as Amos Gitaï ( Promised Land, 2004), the Dardenne Brothers ( Lorna's Silence, 2008), Nick Broomfield ( Ghosts, 2006), Michael Winterbottom ( In This World, 2002), and Ulrich Seidl ( Import/Export, 2002). A range of documentary and activist films are also examined, as well as examples from popular genres, such as Pierre Morel's Taken(2008) and Brad Anderson's Transsiberian(2008).
This dissertation examines these questions by conducting a media history from select cases through the 20th century and into the 21 st where media actors have sought to fill a political vacuum by visualizing distant crimes and producing ethical and political claims in order to mobilize global publics. In doing so, I clarify how technological innovation, strategic use of formal elements, and material practices play key roles in the formation of transnational ethical communities and the channeling of sentiment into action. In the process, the study calls attention to the significant role of media and media actors in political and legal processes, and elucidates the ways in which these media formations have never been explicitly political or legal, but from their inception intertwined in the entertainment media practices that generate so much suspicion in popular and scholarly discourses.
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