“Snakeheads”

I’m passing along a friend’s appeal for help finishing up a pretty alarming short-film project. The subject matter is “snakeheads”: Chinese smugglers who sneak Chinese people, many of them children, into the United States. Once here, the smuggled people—“walking merchandise,” which is the film’s title—are often saddled with enormous debt that they’re then compelled to work off.

You can check out the trailer here. My friend Ethan’s appeal is below the fold, but donations are being solicited at Kickstarter. As the message says, this is “all-or-nothing fundraising”; if the goal of $10,000 isn’t met by November 8th, none of the pledged money actually goes to the film project.

Read the rest of this entry »