BRAMA, May 5, 2004, 9:00 am ET
Press Release
Ukrainian Institute of America to Screen Lukas Moodyson film 'Lilya 4-Ever'
Goal is to increase awareness about trafficking of East European women
A 15-year-old girl in the rubble of the former Soviet Union sinks from poverty to prostitution
in a tragic journey that also approaches a kind of divine love. Both shattering and mysteriously
elating, this critically acclaimed film from the director of Tillsammans (Together) has been
compared to the work of Mizoguchi.
Sweden · 2002 ·109 mins · Color · In Russian and Swedish with English subtitles
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New York — "Lilya 4-Ever," a critically acclaimed feature-length film by award-winning Swedish Director Lukas Moodysson, will be the focus of a special screening at the Ukrainian Institute of America on 2 East 79th Street (Corner of 5th Avenue) on Friday, May 14, 2004.
The event will begin with opening remarks by Jersey City's Lieutenant and President of Police Management Consultants International, Walter Zalisko who has been actively working on the issue since 1997. Briefing will be at 7:00 pm, followed by the screening of the film at 7:30. Media are invited to attend.
Through a heart-wrenching vignette of post-Soviet realism, the film, which received the award for Best Swedish Film in 2002, reveals the aching portrait of an Eastern European 16-year old, who through a series of events including abandonment, lack of employment opportunities and the lure of a dream to overcome her economic circumstances, finds herself sold into sexual slavery in Sweden. This phenomenon reverberates throughout Ukraine, one of the largest source countries of trafficking victims
"While exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint, roughly 75% of the apprehended cases of trafficking victims in the New York area in the past year have been from Eastern Europe - about 50 % comprise young women and children from Ukraine," said Roksolana Luchkan, steering committee head of the emerging "New York Coalition to Stop Trafficking". "Criminal organizations prey on women, offering what seem like legitimate jobs abroad, then confiscating passports and brutally coercing them into working in the sex industry."
The movie, which premiered in Ukraine in 2003, with the support of the Swedish Embassy, the Organization for Security and Cooperation, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Development Program, stimulated widespread discussion in several oblasts of Ukraine. Although Ukraine was one of the first countries in Europe to formally criminalize human trafficking by adopting Article 149 in its new Criminal Code to make human trafficking an indictable criminal offence, more can be done in destination cities such as New York to raise the awareness of trafficking scope and impact among policy-makers and the public-at-large.
Sponsors for the event include the Ukrainian Institute of America, Amnesty's Firefly Project, the Ukrainian Women's League of America, PLAST Kurin Spartanky, National Council of Women/USA and the World's Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organizations. The screening is the first in a series of the Ukrainian Institute of America's activities to contribute to the prevention of trafficking of women from Eastern Europe.
For further information, please contact:
The Ukrainian Institute of America
2 East 79th Street · New York, NY 10021
212-288-8660
programs@ukrainianinstitute.org
ukrainianinstitute.org
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