Based on a New York Times Magazine story, this is a crime drama starring Kevin Kline. We witness a 13 year old girl in Mexico City plucked off the street in broad daylight by Russian mafioso while riding a bicycle.  We also see them pick up two Polish girls at the airport who came with the understanding that they were going to be entering the U.S. in Los Angeles for jobs.

The girls immediately get brutalized, drugged and raped, except for the 13 year old, since as a virgin she is going to fetch a better price at the auction. The Mexican girl’s brother, a resourceful youth, eventually teams up with a Texan cop (Kline) and they follow the trail of the thugs with the girls all the way to New Jersey.

We catch a glimpse of the shady underworld of sex slavery, where scores of innocent girls are kidnapped, extorted, threatened that their families would be harmed, if the did not cooperate. They get abused every step of the way, by every handler along the many way stations, until they eventually get sold — and there it starts all over again. Who knows what a person that buys another human being will do with his purchase?

When I watched this I kept being shocked about the fact that, and forgive my language here, this kind of shit is actually going down. My ethics does not allow myself to consider using and abusing other humans. It just does not work for me. How another person, Russian mafia, border Mexican coyote, women, men, scum and slime can actually believe that if they simply pluck a young girl of the street, shove her into a car and speed away, they then have the right to rape her, beat her and sell her? What goes on in the brain of such a person?

Do they love? Are they loved by anyone? Who wants to be with someone like that? Are they happy?