Film telling story of trafficking victim to be shown at UIA (05/09/04)

Film telling story of trafficking victim to be shown at UIA

NEW YORK - "Lilya 4-Ever," a critically acclaimed feature-length film by award-winning Swedish Director Lukas Moodysson, will be the focus of a special screening at the Ukrainian Institute of America on 2 E. 79th St. (corner of Fifth Avenue) on Friday, May 14.

The event will begin with opening remarks by Walter Zalisko, Jersey City's lieutenant and president of Police Management Consultants International, who has been actively working on the issue since 1997. The briefing will be at 7 p.m., followed by the screening of the film at 7:30.

In a heart-wrenching vignette of post-Soviet realism, the film, which received the award for Best Swedish Film in 2002, reveals the aching portrait of an Eastern European 16-year-old, who through a series of events - including abandonment, lack of employment opportunities and the lure of a dream to overcome her economic circumstances - finds herself sold into sexual slavery in Sweden. This phenomenon reverberates throughout Ukraine, one of the largest source countries of trafficking victims.

"While exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint, roughly 75 percent of the apprehended cases of trafficking victims in the New York area in the past year have been from Eastern Europe - about 50 percent comprise young women and children from Ukraine," said Roksolana Luchkan, steering committee head of the emerging New York Coalition to Stop Trafficking. "Criminal organizations prey on women, offering what seem like legitimate jobs abroad, then confiscating passports and brutally coercing them into working in the sex industry," she added.

The movie, which premiered in Ukraine in 2003, with the support of the Swedish Embassy, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Development Program, stimulated widespread discussion in several oblasts of Ukraine. Although Ukraine was one of the first countries in Europe to formally criminalize human trafficking by adopting Article 149 in its new Criminal Code to make human trafficking an indictable criminal offense, more can be done in destination cities such as New York to raise the awareness of trafficking scope and impact among policy-makers and the public-at-large, noted organizers of the film screening.

Sponsors for the event include the Ukrainian Institute of America, Amnesty International's Firefly Project, the Ukrainian National Women's League of America, Plast's Spartanky Sorority, National Council of Women/USA and the World Federation of Ukrainian Women Organizations. The screening is the first in a series of UIA activities aimed at contributing to the prevention of trafficking of women from Eastern Europe.

For further information, readers may contact the UIA via phone, (212) 288-8660, or send an e-mail message to [email protected].

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