In October, the Liu Institute for Global Issues is hosting a free screening and exhibition of The Price of Sex. The exhibition features work from award-winning Mimi Chakarova, who generously donated her collection to the Global Reporting Centre.
Past events
The Global Reporting Centre has hosted a series of free exhibitions around the city featuring photography from Mimi Chakarova’s award-winning project The Price of Sex.
The first public launch of the exhibit was held on Thursday, April 1st at The Drive Coffee Bar.
Our second event was hosted at Havana Gallery on April 13th. The exhibit began with a public discussion about the global sex trade, with talks from Chakarova, FBI Special Agent Steve Vienneau, human rights lawyer Nicole Barrett and activist Suzanne Jay.
Chakarova is a Bulgarian-American documentary filmmaker who spent years reporting on the global sex trade. She went undercover as a prostitute in Turkey to gain unprecedented access to the women and traffickers of Eastern European sex workers. In 2011 she produced the critically-acclaimed documentary film The Price of Sex.
Special Agent Vienneau works for the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children Unit and has been involved in Operation Cross Country, a national task force combating child sex trafficking. Barrett is the Director of the International Justice and Human Rights Clinic, and worked on the National Task Force on the Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada. Jay is a leading feminist in Vancouver and a Member of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution.
About The Price of Sex
The Price of Sex is a multimedia investigation of young Eastern European women who have been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives.