RSA grad stars in film tackling human trafficking

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Giovanni Mocibob, a 2005 Rosebud School of the Arts graduate, plays the lead in She Has a Name, a new film about human trafficking.
The Unveil Studios film, written by Andrew Kooman and directed by Daniel Kooman and Matthew Kooman, premiered internationally in December 2016, and is now being screened across Canada, including a Calgary screening in February. U.S. screenings will begin in April.
The story is set in Thailand. Fifty people have been abandoned, left to die, in a shipping container, after the truck trafficking them across the border from Malaysia broke down on a rural road.
Mocibob plays Jason, a young American lawyer who’s looking for evidence of trafficking. He meets a 15-year-old girl in a Thai brothel, and discovers she was one of the few transferred out of the shipping container before it was abandoned.
Mocibob’s wife, Holly Pillsbury, plays his wife in the film. The team filmed for two weeks at Unveil Studios in Red Deer, and for four weeks in Pataya, Thailand, in an area called The Walking Street.
“All of (The Walking Street) is just strip clubs and bars,” Mocibob said. “And the bar that we (shot in) in the movie, is an actual bar. We’d shoot during the day, and as we would wrap, we’d be leaving as girls were coming in and getting ready for their night. Yeah. It was heavy.”
Mocibob said that the men coming to buy sexual services, of all ages and diverse cultural backgrounds, looked like “regular guys. You put the idea of some deranged face on it, but it’s like no, these are just people that we may know.”
Performing the role opened Mocibob’s eyes to the issue of human trafficking, and he said the film is now doing the same for audiences.
He referred to a statistic shown at the end of the film: two million children – plus women and men – are exploited in the global sex trade every year, and less than one per cent are ever rescued.
The film moves people to want to do something, and he said the good news is that buying a ticket makes a difference. Twenty per cent of all proceeds goes to IJM Canada, Iris Cambodia and Glowbal Act, which fight human trafficking by providing education, rescue and after-care.
“A good way too (to make a difference) is to bring demand down,” Mocibob said. “That needs to change in the hearts of men.
“We as a culture don’t realize the responsibility we have to foster responsible young men, who grow up to be men who respect women, and aren’t going to just run away to fulfill some dark fantasy over there because it’s frowned on here.
“We each have different skills and talents and they’ll manifest in different ways, as we look into how to serve our community to make it a better place,” Mocibob added. “If one person is affected enough that they make a big change in some way, whatever that creative way is, then that’s amazing.”
For information about where to see She Has a Name, to purchase the film or book a screening, go to shehasanamefilm.com.