A new film starring Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto, and Demi Moore — about the real-life story of a young Indian girl who gets trapped in the global sex trade — struggled to get funding because it was too controversial.

Love Sonia, the gritty film that also features Anupam Kher, will premiere in June as it opens Europe’s largest South Asian cinema gathering — the Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival.

“It’s been a long, long journey. A very difficult one because the truth is no one wanted to make this film,” first-time director Tabrez Noorani told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“No one wanted to make a film about trafficking in Hindi.”

Noorani, a producer on the Academy Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi and Eat, Pray, Love, said he first encountered sex trafficking victims in Los Angeles in 2003. After some girls were found in a container shipped from China, he was inspired to work with charities tackling the issue.

“The misconception is that it’s only women and girls. It’s not. It’s young boys, it’s old men, it’s older women... There’s all types of trafficking. No one is immune to it. Literally, it’s all races, all ages and both genders,” he said.

More than 40 million people globally are trapped in forced labour, forced marriages and sexual exploitation, the United Nations estimates, earning criminal networks illegal profits of $150 billion a year. At least 18 million slaves are in India — trafficked into brothels, forced to work as manual labourers, or even born into servitude — the Walk Free 
Foundation, an Australian-based rights group, estimated in 2016.

For Mumbai-born Freida, a vocal humanitarian and advocate for women’s empowerment, the issue of trafficking needs collective action.

“Just because this film is in Hindi, it’s not a problem that just one country suffers from. It’s really a global problem,” she said. (Reuters)