Bangkok-Bahrain Labour for Sale

In Thailand, half a million women work as prostitutes while men leave the country as low-paid laborers in the Gulf Emirates. A film on the trade of human beings and economic relations in the modern world.

This uncomfortably lucid film about the international traffic in contract laborers, mainly from the South-East Asian countries, to the Persian Gulf and Europe, masks its horror with the cool depiction of hard evidence. It concentrates chiefly on the way such virtually enforced displacement affects the relationship of ordinary people, poor and desperate, who are involved.

Derek Malcolm, London Film Festival Catalogue, 1984

A strategy of address that tries to mobilize meanings rather than impose them. It works with the cultural and the political knowledge assumed to be present in the viewer, calling on non-automatic, non-normative ways of deciphering one’s environment.

Paul Willemen, The Films of Amos Gitai, A Montage, BFI, London, 1993

CREDITS

Cinematography Roni Katzenelson, Richard Copans

Editing Juliana Sanchez

Sound Olivier Schwab

Production TF1 (France), A.G. Productions (Israel), Channel Four (UK), Ikon (The Netherlands)