It Happened Just Before

IT HAPPENED JUST BEFORE is an artistic examination of the global phenomenon of trafficking in women. Anja Salomonowitz chooses an unusual approach to the topic: her film is based on real stories of trafficked women, from which the director has developed a documentary script. The stories are not told by the victims themselves or by actors, but by people who could have a relationship to the events and places in the film: a customs officer, a villager, a brothel waiter, a diplomat and a taxi driver. Trafficking in women does not only take place in the darkest corners of the world, but also here, in our city, and before our eyes. Anja Salomonowitz writes about her film: “I have a sexually transmitted disease. I can't go to the doctor because I don't have insurance. I fell in love with one of the men who held me captive. He is now my boyfriend. He says he will escape with me. He deliberately gets infected from me so that he can go to the doctor for both of us. Because then we can share the medication.” The question for me was how I could tell these brutal stories in such a way that the structural background comes to the fore and they no longer appear fateful. To say that the woman concerned is not insane to infect her boyfriend, but is virtually forced to do so – by a system in which she cannot get health insurance. The stories of trafficking in women are usually told in the media with a black bar in front of the face. A woman sits in the picture, she cries. The usual pattern is produced: the poor victim in the film and the viewer who feels pity. But what the women concerned need is not pity - they need rights so that these stories do not happen to them in the first place. The images that I show in “It Happened Just Before” to accompany the women's stories are from the everyday lives of the people who tell these stories. No suspenders, no bare bottoms. I consciously wanted to show different images - and refuse the usual illustration of the stories. I question a documentary approach: To what extent does the victim have to tell their story themselves? What happens if I break the usual agreement with the viewer about who is allowed to tell what to whom? Two realities collide. For me, this is how power structures are exposed in a tangible and poignant way in “It Happened Just Before”. This is how two films are created at the same time: the one you see and the one you hear and imagine. The thoughts that arise from the stories told, the images that are conjured up in the mind, are the main plot. Something that you don't see on the screen. It's just like in real life, because these women and their stories are ignored by society.