Film review: Sita, A Girl from Jambu

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 4 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Film review: Sita, A Girl from Jambu Illène Pevec University of Colorado Citation: Pevec, Illène. (2007). "Film review: Sita, A Girl from Jambu." Children, Youth and Environments 17 (4). Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/ Producer, co-writer, director, editor: Kathleen Man Released: 2006 In Nepal, 7,000 to 10,000 children, mostly girls, are kidnapped or lured into the sex trade and sold into brothels in India each year. Nepalese girls from small villages live lives of hard work gathering fodder for livestock, carrying water, tending crops, children and households. Men, pimps for the brothels of India, lure the girls with promises of fame and easy work as actresses or models. Sita, A Girl from Jambu, filmed entirely on-location in Nepal, introduces us to one such girl and her tragic and all too-common tale. Kathleen Man, the producer, director, editor and co-writer with the children in the cast, worked with the Free A Child Bitali Project in Nepal (www.freeachild.org) to develop and film this documentary. The cast comes from a girls’ street theater company, part of the Bitali Project, which exists to heighten awareness of this danger to girls as young as ten in rural areas of Nepal. Facilitators work with the girls to help them write scripts and songs, to perform dramas at market places—literally in the streets—to alert girls and their families to the constant danger of the sex trade. The girls call their street play Bitari Sita (Poor Sita). The film moves deftly from street theater to film story and back again to show the contrast of young girls having fun together working on a creative project performed in their community market places, to the treachery and fear that awaits thousands of girls trapped in the international trafficking of children for sex. The girls in the street theater program, young teens from the community with no training 443 in drama before their participation in this project, wrote not only the script but also the songs they sing. The original soundtrack won an award at the Moondance Festival. This award-winning video highlights a problem infamous in the Nepal/India border region. But Free A Child has also worked in Denver, Colorado since 2006 because homeless teens in the U.S. are also at risk of being solicited into the sex trade. These frightening problems affecting children also exist in countries considered to be “developed.” Man’s film brings the child-sex trade problem into vivid color for international audiences, and gives those showing it the opportunity to tie it to local information, lest people think only far-away places harbor such crimes. Development organizations, schools, youth groups, and teachers, can use this vivid and touching portrayal of children trapped in a cycle of poverty, ignorance and constant danger to heighten awareness and stimulate discussion. Sita, A Girl from Jambu has won Jury Award for Best Documentary at the University Film/Video Conference at Chapman University, CA; an Award of Commendation by the jury of the Society for Visual Anthropology/American Anthropological Association Film and Video Festival (SVA/AAA); Best Documentary and Best Score at the Moondance International Film Festival in Hollywood; and Best Documentary at the Bare Bones International Independent Film Festival in Muskogee, OK. From Salmon Film’s websitehttp://www.salmonpictures.net/links.html, downloaded July 10, 2007: Currently, Kathleen is co-directing and editing a feature-length documentary entitled Beauty Mark, a film that examines American society’s obsession with unattainable beauty and perfection. Kathleen was an Iowa Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she received an M.F.A. in Film and Video Production and an M.A. in Communication Studies. At YaleUniversity, she received a B.A. with honors and distinction in Film Studies and the Howard Lamar Prize in Film Studies. Kathleen has been a professor of film production in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder 444 since 2001, where she teaches fiction and documentary filmmaking, directing, cinematography, editing and screenwriting. In Fall 2007, Kathleen will join the faculty of the...