"Lilya 4-Ever"

Directed by Swede Lukas Moodysson, Lilya 4-Ever is a wrenching story of a girl who is sold into sex slavery.

In a post-Soviet Estonian slum, sixteen year old Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is elated when she finds out her mother's new online boyfriend is taking both of them to the States. The day before the trip, Lilya finds out from her mother that she is not invited after all, and that she will be left alone with her battle-axe aunt Anna. Though her mother promises she will send for her, we know this is just the beginning for Lilya bleak existence. "Aunt Anna" steals her mother's flat away from Lilya and forced her to stay in disgusting closet where an old man had just died a week before. With no money, no food, and dwindling hope that her mother will ever send for her, she fends off apartment quad boys sniffing glue in her apartment and making advances, a battle-ax landlady who steals her mail and shuts off her electricity, and a mischievious little boy Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky). Her friend persuades her to go to the city to prostitute herself, but Lilya does not participate. After she and Volodya become fast friends looking out for one another and helping each other within the apartment quad, Anna shuts Lilya out for good, her friends turn on her, and she is desperate, hungry, and cold. She is then forced to prostitute herself to survive. She is raped in her own apartment. She meets a young man, Andrei (Pavel Ponomaryov), who makes promises to about a better life in Sweden, but when she arrives, she is sold into sex slavery and kills herself.


Do something: http://www.globalfundforwomen.org/cms/hot-topics/trafficking/trafficking---grants--resources.html