Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
"Nefarious" was written, directed, produced, and narrated by Benjamin Nolot, founder and president of Exodus Cry. Exodus Cry, which distributed the film, is headquartered in Grandview, Missouri and is an organization that opposes human trafficking by raising awareness, by reintegrating victims back into society, and by prayer. Nolot founded Exodus Cry in 2007 after a woman he did not know gave him , saying that God told her to do so in order that Nolot might found an anti-human-trafficking organization. This was founded at a prayer meeting later that year where attendees prayed for human trafficking victims. The organization claims that this prayer meeting occurred on the day before the announcement of the 2007 international child pornography investigation, which involved approximately 2,400 human-trafficking-related arrests in 77 countries.
Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
"Nefarious" covers human trafficking in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Interviews are interspersed with re-enactments. The film opens with a re-enactment of a girl being kidnapped by organized criminals. She is confined with other girls in a dark room, lit by a flickering lightbulb. Men order the girls to remove their clothes, and then examine them and shout commands and threats at them, causing them to cry from fear. One girl is dragged into another room. A victim of ordeals such as these, speaking in voiceover, explains that, in this situation, girls are often taken into a separate room to have their sexual performance tested. Identifying these events as taking place near Belgrade, Serbia, the film then tracks the fictional girls through Croatia to Amsterdam's red-light district De Wallen, and to sex markets in Berlin and Las Vegas. The film states that this slavery goes unnoticed in cities where prostitution is legal. Slaves are depicted in confinement, at their places of work, and as they are sold. Many of the girls are orphans, and all are either kidnapped or tricked into forced prostitution. Traffickers in the film use hard drugs, brainwashing and sexual and physical abuse to keep the girls under control.