Actor Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in the extremely successful, “The Passion of the Christ,” is the star of a brand new film that deals with the horrific reality of human trafficking and how it puts on display the depth of humankind’s brokenness and depravity. There are tens of thousands of innocent children who get caught up in sex slavery and human trafficking every single year. It’s become, according to Fox News, a $150 billion dollar industry across the globe.
The new movie, “The Sound of Freedom,” is set to be released on July 4th, which, as everyone here in the United States knows, is the day that we celebrate our independence. Caviezel recently made an appearance on Fox’s Lighthouse Faith podcast where he said that during the making of the film he said, “I was thinking about my own children.”
Lauren Green, writing for Fox News, stated that Caviezel’s latest project is a somber reminder that the freedom we all love and take for granted is not free, but comes from a hard-fought victory. There was a lot of blood shed during the Revolutionary War in order to ensure we would have a nation of our own. Not even a century later, a Civil War would be fought on our soil to determine whether or not millions of African-Americans would be able to live as a free people in our country.
However, the end of slavery in that time period did not result in the utter destruction of the practice altogether. Human trafficking is continuing the terrible, bloody, horrible legacy that marred our young country early in its history. For Jim Caviezel, the movie is very, very personal.
“My wife and I adopted three children from China. And I was well aware … of the problems and dangers that children face globally,” he revealed during the interview. Caviezel, who is a dedicated Catholic, stated that his movie helps to shed light on the spiritual evil that lies underneath the surface of human beings who have become complicit in this activity simply by doing nothing to bring it to an end.
Caviezel then said, “You have good, and you have evil. It’s always been this way. But then you have the group in the middle that are riding the fence. The devil owns the fence.”
The actor pointed out that just last year, 85,000 kids went missing. On April 26, a whistleblower provided testimony before Homeland Security about the awful things happening in the dark world of human trafficking.
“The next day in the media, nothing … It’s as if they didn’t want this story to get out there,” Caviezel said. “300,000 children under the age of 18 were lured into the sex trafficking business in the United States. We are the biggest consumers of child trafficking and pornography in the world. The United States — the home of the free, land of the brave. This is ridiculous. And so the film is a threat.”
Caviezel spent significant time working with Ballard in order to develop a feel for how agents pursue human traffickers. However, Ballard shared a specific incident with one boy that really changed everything.
“He’s met with an opportunity when he takes on the worst pedophile trafficker they’d ever seen. And he saves this little boy. And the five-year-old boy says, ‘Will you save my sister?’ So, Ballard goes home, talks to his wife. She sends him out, and he tries to find this little girl. [That’s] the basis of the film’s story,” the actor recounted.
And that is the basis of the film. Caviezel then said that, as is the case with the majority of projects he takes on, the film has some redemptive qualities.
The actor provided a little clarity on that by saying, “It doesn’t mean I’m going to play the good guy, but that the audience comes away with something that challenges them. As I’ve said before, I don’t go to the devil to play the devil. I go to God to tell me who the devil is.”
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