[imagesource:angelstudios]

Director Alejandro Monteverde started shooting Sound Of Freedom as a way to bring attention to the dark world of child sex trafficking.

But with one supposedly fictional American hero at the centre of the movie being modelled on a real-life conspiratorial public figure, the film has been stirring up a lot of charged rhetoric and is now marred in terrifying controversy.

“I never intended to make a movie to glorify Tim Ballard. It was a movie to call attention to the problem, the subject matter, the darkness,” Monteverde said via Vanity Fair. “I always thought this was a movie that was going to bring people together.”

Everybody is mostly freaking out about Sound Of Freedom thanks to the folks associated with the movie. Monteverde had begun writing his script for the movie but ended up changing the storyline when he was introduced to Tim Ballard.

Ballard is a former homeland security special agent who had started to make waves for a nonprofit he founded, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which reportedly had a hand in rescuing trafficked children.

Monteverde was impressed with what he found out about Ballard on the internet, saying that his “story surpassed my fiction”:

The online results were plentiful and included a glowing CBS News feature from 2014 on Operation Triple Take, a joint action between OUR and the Colombian government that reportedly rescued 123 trafficked people—55 of whom were children.

While Ballard was gaining more mainstream legitimacy, Erin Albright, an attorney and longtime adviser to anti-trafficking task forces, says he and OUR aren’t actually central to the international fight against human trafficking:

“The majority of the [anti-trafficking] field views them as fringe,” she tells me. “They peddle sensationalism…and they fundraise off it.”

But these critiques weren’t part of the conversation when Monteverde was in the middle of making his movie in 2018:

“I never in a million years imagined that this would be political,” he said of the film, which would become a Ballard biopic—albeit one that takes great liberties with the facts. After all, he says, “I saw the piece [on child trafficking] on the mainstream media … I always thought that this was going to be a film that we would all come together over.”

Several pivotal things happened in the years between the film’s shooting and its arrival in theatres this year, causing it to be muddied by horrendous misinformation. First, there were growing claims that Ballard and OUR were phoney and up to no good:

In a series that kicked off in 2020, Vice journalists Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman began a probe of Ballard and OUR, discovering “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.” In a subsequent report, they alleged Ballard and his organization had engaged in “blundering missions—carried out in part by real estate agents and high-level donors—that seemed aimed mainly at generating exciting video footage.”

The second development happened around late 2020 when QAnon started to use claims about child trafficking as an outreach strategy:

The QAnon set of conspiracy theories originated in 2017 and gradually gained notice by the mainstream in the ensuing years. The movement’s “core falsehood,” as The New York Times put it, asserts that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

The conversation to baseless theories about who they believe is doing the trafficking was flooding social media, with campaigns targeting a cabal of nefarious elites that includes Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Pope Francis.

Monteverde obviously couldn’t have predicted any of this when pre-production began on Sound of Freedom, and he met with actor Jim Caviezel (he stars as the main character), another one of the problematic people associated with the film.

Caviezel hasn’t said anything outright about the movie and QAnon but news coverage of statements he’s made in recent years suggest that he shares the unsubstantiated QAnon belief that the wealthy and famous harvest the blood of kidnapped children in pursuit of a chemical called adrenochrome.

“QAnon was really just ramping up as the movie was being shot,” says Mike Rothschild, author of a QAnon history book The Storm Is Upon Us. “Caviezel has had his Q-pilled awakening in the last few years, I think partially because of him shooting this movie.”

WIRED has a fascinating article about adrenochrome and the ‘The Dark Virality of a Hollywood Blood-Harvesting Conspiracy’.

There’s also the slimy way that the movie has been marketed. When Utah–based Angel Studios got the film rights, it added a call to action to its credits, encouraging patrons to help “raise awareness” of child trafficking. However, instead of donating to anti-trafficking groups or even directly to Ballard’s efforts, patrons are asked to “pay it forward” by purchasing additional tickets for the film. Sneaky.

Sound of Freedom had made over $100 million already, a kind of success that is frustrating to trafficking survivors who say that narratives like that aren’t really representative of how more commonly this crime actually happens. Even OUR agrees on this point, writing on its own website that “while this type of human trafficking exists, it isn’t the majority,” and that “most trafficking happens through a manipulative grooming process,” not through the kidnapping scenarios portrayed in the film.

If the success of the film is a sight for sore eyes for those in the know about what actually happens in child trafficking, then any criticism of it is chalked up to being an excuse for paedophiles to run amok according to the likes of Ballard.

Ballard claimed outlets that have reviewed the film or its apparent politics unfavorably are also trying to “normalize sexual activity with children,” and declared that “pedophiles are salivating” at reviews that are anything less than positive.

And here we thought the controversy around Don’t Worry Darling was getting too convoluted.

[source:vanityfair]