Los Angeles: Actor Martin Sheen has given his full support to the feature documentary film ‘To Be Free’ which covers the issues of labour trafficking in the US. he said that it is happening right in front of everyone’s eyes.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Sheen said: “People need to understand this is so prevalent and it’s happening under our eyes in the United States and in other countries in the West.”
The actor, best known for his roles in films such as ‘The Departed’, ‘Catch Me If You Can’, ‘Badlands’, ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Judas and The Black Messiah’ among many other massive hits, is also a big political activist.
Martin Sheen is executive producing the feature which explores the issues and challenges of tackling labour trafficking in the United States, where people are coerced into various forms of bonded labour through many methods.
Some of these include fraud as well as abuse of power to force them to do unpaid work in restaurants, farm fields, and construction sites or nail salons.
Directed by Benjamin Ryan Nathan, the documentary covers a well known yet virtually hidden crisis of human trafficking which has made inroads into pretty much every American town and every sector of the economy.
The affair of labour trafficking in the US is so big that it has been compared to essentially slavery. As such, ‘To Be Free’ uses animation and live-action dramatisations, the inspirational testimony of victims, witnesses and survivors as well as experts in the socio-political domain to reveal the breadth and depth of the modern slavery problem in the U.S. ahead of eyeing meaningful social change.
Sheen also went on to connect the issues of modern slavery with nuclear proliferation, who he has been a long standing critic of. The actor who had portrayed fictional American president Josiah Bartlet in ‘The West Wing’ series told THR: “You can’t separate one issue from another. They’re all part of a vast area of abuse on vulnerable human beings, whether it’s homelessness or drug addiction or immigrants seeking a safe port.’
He added: “I’ve tried to focus wherever there were people who were abused, or there was a sense of abuse, someone without a voice, that could not get attention to their plight or the criminality that they were exposed to. They all have equal importance as long as a human being is being denied their rights.”
–IANS
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