Louis Vuitton Hawaii International FIlm Festival 2008

An incredibly difficult film to watch, CHILDREN OF THE DARK nevertheless beckons us to swallow its horrific content. Mapping the organizational structure of the Thai child prostitute and organ trade market reveals a tapestry in which a plurality of geopolitical forces are weaved together to form a polychromatic ethnoscape. Consequently, responsibility becomes evermore fugitive. The film, however, certainly doesn't hesitate to force the audience to reflect on its own complicity. Against all the scenes of subjective violence inflicted by those trading in and those consuming children, the camera often delivers affection-images of the children that summons Emmanuel Levinas's theorization of the face as that which reveals the precariousness of life. While the face simultaneously tempts destruction and beckons respect, we viewers become responsible for which side of that face shows. In a sequence of images toward the end of the film, the camera records a girl being taken into a hospital where she'll be killed in the scalping of her heart for an ill Japanese boy. After shifting to a shot of a Japanese reporter helplessly gazing on, the film captures a shot of the girl who turns her face to look directly into the camera. In a final shot that is a close-up of the reporter's eyes staring into the camera, we viewers fail to watch the film in our passivity; it is not we who simply watch the film, but rather, the film is watching us. This cinematic interpellation forces us into contemplation about our own complicity in the film's depicted atrocities as well as how averting our eyes to what is visually disturbing onscreen participates in the same violence that is perpetuated offscreen by closing our eyes in ignorance to purchase a bit of comfort that the victimized children lack in so many ways.