Working with Vannak Prum: A 2012 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Hero
Jocelyn Pederick is an award-winning filmmaker and founding member of Goodmorningbeautiful films. Since her first film, twenty pieces (1996), documenting out-workers in Melbourne, Jocelyn has brought critical stories to a mainstream audience. Her award-winning documentary films have told stories of labour rights, human trafficking, poverty, women’s rights, and climate change. This has included work on 4 continents and 30 countries.
Jocelyn is co-author of the acclaimed graphic novel, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, which she is currently adapting into an animated feature film.
By Jocelyn Pederick
In 2012, my production company, Goodmorningbeautiful Films, was hired to do a report on the pervasiveness of human trafficking across Asia. The common misconception at that time framed this issue as mainly relating to sexual slavery that affected women and girls. Having worked for a few years with NGO’s in Cambodia that focussed on combatting human trafficking, we knew full well that the reach of indentured labour and slavery was indeed far more endemic. Our project was thus an opportunity to reveal heretofore unrecognized modes of human trafficking, certainly as it existed and continues to exist, in the economies of Asia.
It was while working on this project that I encountered Vannak Prum, who I first met at his mother's house.
Keep in mind that this is regional Cambodia. Imagine a small dusty village. The road is dirt, the houses built from planks of wood and there are children and chickens playing in the street. Yes, everyone is poor, but some are poorer than others. Vannak is staying with his mother, a disabled woman in her 60s, which in Cambodian years, is about 150.
Vannak then told me his harrowing saga, occasionally supplemented by amazing drawings. It was, basically, a three-hour monologue, interrupted only to drag from cigarettes. At the end I asked, “are you happy to be home?” He nodded and smiled.
I met Vannak a second time a week later. It was then that he began showing me even more of his drawings. They were truly breathtaking. The details were so exact, and they made his story come alive. I said to him, “this could be a book”. “I know”, he replied.
Very little is known about the men and boys who are enslaved and end up working on fishing boats. It is an underworld trade in human beings that happens so far from the shores of civilization that it effectively eliminates all forms of official scrutiny. It is, in many respects, corruption in its purest form, an assemblage of greed and power located in the hands of psychopaths, where the value of life is nil.
Vannak and I kept working together to tell his story through his drawings. We then found an excellent publisher, Seven Stories Press. Titled The Deadeye and the Deep Blue Sea, this graphic memoir soon received so many wonderful reviews that we started getting invitations throughout the world to talk about it. Since Vannak doesn’t speak English, we then travelled together to tell his story, while simultaneously sharing his artworks with our audiences.
I often tell people this is not a sad story, but instead, a true story. It is, ultimately, about the complicated decisions we all make as human beings to live and survive. At its core, The Deadeye and the Deep Blue Sea, is about a man trying to prove the value of his own life, despite what happened to him.
Human trafficking is a world that we can only now “see” because Vannak has drawn it. The raw honesty of his images is startling. They graphically remind the reader that a person truly witnessed this, lived through this, and even more importantly, has survived it.
Like the flash of recognition, or the indelible shock of a flashback, image by image Vannak drew from his memory the inconceivable events that repeatedly transpired within this hidden world of unimaginable brutality and violence. Almost casually emerges an image of a man beheading another man. Storms, accidents, attacks, dreams, and terrifying rumours of creatures from the deep are ever-present as well. Vannak’s art is so effective because it carries the reader through an invisible door into a parallel universe that actually exists within the one we know.
I've made many films and reports on human trafficking, and every survivor has an unbelievable story. I've spoken to thirteen-year old’s sold to brothels, pregnant women whose unborn babies have been sold, women who sold themselves to avoid starvation, and boys forced to kill or be killed. They all have their testimony. It lives inside them and is their only record of their story and their will to survive. But only Vannak has a way of showing us: this is what it feels like to be a slave.
This book is a memoir, it is a recreation and it is a testimony. Every time Vannak puts pen to paper we are immersed in the invisible world of slavery, come alive through the intricate matrices of black lines he puts on the page. We see what he saw, we feel what he felt. This is Vannak's life as he sees it through his eyes. This is the Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea.
This is a truly universal story, with an eternal theme, yet it is happening right now in our lives. This is a subversive story, with even dangerous consequences for revealing real people, including police and judges, involved in trafficking across Asia. It challenges us to ask at what price the flood of choice and affordability that fuels our consumption of food and objects. And it raises the question about our rights, taken for granted, and what our lives might look like if we let them go.
* This award was presented to Vannak Anan Prum by the then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in recognition of his amazing courage to escape slavery and his remarkable activism to end human trafficking, raising awareness of labor exploitation in the fishing industry of Southeast Asia.