Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
"Nefarious" was written, directed, produced and narrated by Benjamin Nolot, founder and president of Exodus Cry, the film's distributor. Nolot, who travelled to 19 countries to collect the film's content, said that the purpose of the film is "to draw people's attention to the issue, but also to inspire them in terms of what they can be doing … to take a stand against this injustice." The film was officially released on July 27, 2011, with individual grassroots screenings also taking place. Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry's director of awareness and prevention, screened the film in several countries in an attempt to persuade governments to make laws similar to Sweden's "Sex Purchase Act", which criminalizes the purchasing rather than the selling of sex. The film was released on home video on May 1, 2012.
Northern Region Film and Television Archive
The NEFA was founded in January 1998 as an unofficial consortium of four bodies which already held substantial film and television collections within the region: what was then the University of Teesside (now Teesside University), Tyne and Wear Archives Service (TWAS, the county record office for Tyne and Wear), Trade Films (see below) and Cumbria Archives Service (the county record office for Cumbria). Initial funding was provided by Northern Arts (what was then the UK Government's regional agency for distributing public arts funding in the north-east of England), and the organisation began life with a full-time curator and a part-time archivist. In 2001, responsibility for distributing core funding to the English regional film archives passed from Northern Arts to the newly formed UK Film Council's regional agency, Northern Film and Media. A temperature and humidity controlled vault facility was built for the NEFA on the Teesside campus during 2003, and was formally opened the following year. In December 2003, NRFTA Ltd. was formed as a company limited by guarantee (no. 04994213), thus making the archive an independent legal entity. In February 2006, responsibility for providing a moving image archive service to Cumbria passed from the NRFTA to the North West Film Archive. As of February 2010 the NEFA has a staff of two (one full-time and one part-time), both of whom are based at Teesside University. The NEFA is one of a network of eight regional film archives in England. It is an 'emerging archive' member institution of the UK Film Archive Forum.In July 2012, NEFA merged with the Yorkshire Film Archive (YFA), a registered charity (no. 1093468), and now comes under the YFA banner and charity. Together,they have a growing collection currently containing over 50,000 titles - 17,000 held by YFA, and 33,000 held by NEFA - ranging from films made by the early film pioneers of the late 1890s, to recent footage of changing landscapes and life across both regions.