RFA Documentary Recognized at AIBs

WASHINGTON – Last night, Radio Free Asia’s documentary film, “An Invisible World: The Lives of Slaves in Modern Asia,” was “highly commended” as a finalist at the Association of International Broadcasters’ 2012 Media Excellence Awards in the category of best investigative television documentary.

Based on RFA’s award-winning online human trafficking series, the half-hour documentary represents the research and work of videographers spanning a year. The ongoing project, which won a Hong Kong Human Rights Press award in April this year, documents child soldier recruitment in Burma, labor abuses in China’s black factories, traffickers targeting refugee camps in Thailand, and North Korean mothers being forcibly wed in China, among other instances of trafficking.

Drawing from in-country interviews with victims, NGO representatives, and traffickers themselves, the videos tell the first-person stories of trafficking that affects millions in Asia. Together, the individual videos seek to go beyond the content’s shock value to explore the human subjects and complex factors that underpin trafficking in Asia, namely, population displacement, poverty, ethnic discrimination, cultural pressures, war, and government corruption, among other issues.