Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes from Burma

What could be worse than spending your youth cobbling Nikes in a sweatshop for 20 cents an hour? Being bartered in a Bangkok brothel. This video relates the sad fate of four young Burmese girls whose only escape from the extreme poverty of their hill tribe was to work in neighboring Thailand's sex industry. Like modern-day Joan of Arc's gone geisha, each girl's sacrifice of youth, health and morality was made altruistically, usually to provide a meager existence for their peasant families back home. The dreary decadence they endured daily is related through tearful descriptions of their near-captive employment and furtive footage shot inside the brothels. The video favors an impressionistic, rather than vérité, approach in its depiction of this human tragedy: lingering shots of flames and smoke are a reoccurring metaphor for the destruction and evanescence of the girls' lives and the final frame revealing a small foot extending from a funeral pyre is absolutely haunting. Although the filmmaker's political leanings are not overtly flaunted in the video, it becomes obvious as the drama unfolds that the current military dictatorship in Burma (now called Myanmar) is at least partially to blame for the girls' plight. Well-made and heart wrenching, Sacrifice should be mandatory viewing for Western teenagers disenchanted with their so-called lives. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (W. Pierce)