Anamaria Marinca is a 26-year-old Romanian actress who can usually be found on stage in her native Bucharest or in drama festivals around eastern Europe. But in Sex Traffic, a two-part series on Channel 4, her character is raped and abused in jaw-droppingly realistic scenes. Her screen debut has been a shocking lesson in the demands of British drama. “It frightened me during filming and it frightened me when I watched it,” she says. “The part, though, may be the most important of my career.” Marinca and her fellow Romanian Maria Popistasu, 24, play Moldovan sisters in a brutal fictional story based on factual evidence of sex trafficking. Girls from Romania and Moldova are being bought and sold across Serbia, Albania, Bosnia and Italy, before being brought to London to work as prostitutes. Harrowing to watch? Definitely. But the four hours of television, superbly directed by David Yates (State of Play, The Way We Live Now), will help nail the issue high up on the political agenda.
“I felt I could make a contribution to people being aware of the problem by taking this role and acting the scenes, however awful they may appear,” says Marinca. “The most important thing is to know how far to go and to make sure you are not destroyed by the role.” The action, which moves between the smooth but dubious operators who work for a private American contractor, supplying troops to international peacekeeping missions, and the dark and dangerous world of girl-smuggling, offers little light relief for the cast. It is unrelenting, right from the moment a girl is thrown into the Adriatic and left to drown because traffickers fear being caught with their human cargo. “I was always upset whenever I thought about how it was based on reality,” says Marinca. “But we were there to make sure it appeared to be real, to help the story. The drama is so well researched — they know this is happening on a daily basis.”
The arrival in London of these girls, either promised jobs by their eastern European smugglers or simply kidnapped, has been growing apace. The writer of Sex Traffic, Abi Morgan, claims that since Moldova became independent in 1991, a quarter of the population has gone missing. Many are girls who have been trafficked abroad. “When the facts are more shocking than fiction, the story tells itself,” she says. Since 2001, when the producers Derek Wax and Michele Buck brought the project to Channel 4, there has been considerable research. Lucy Richer, the commissioning editor, insists: “We did not want to go ahead with what is an extraordinary thriller before being sure of our ground. Once we were convinced, our commitment could not have been greater.”
That commitment has been matched by a £5.8m budget, making Sex Traffic Channel 4’s most expensive production since Shackleton, two years ago. This is a bigger budget than almost any British movie produced last year: the usual cost of television drama is £400,000-£800,000 an hour. But filming scenes in Romania and Britain, as well as some in Canada, has not come cheap. The cast, though, which includes the actor John Simm as an investigator for a London-based charity, is hardly big-budget. And the lead actresses, who were hired only days before filming started, after a six-month search for good performers with perfect English, were more used to Romanian rates. “The money was generous,” says Marinca, whose previous theatre work includes roles in Willy Russell’s Stags and Hens and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. “London has been held up in our country as the dream place to be — and it is. But its appeal is also the reason so many of our girls are fooled.”
The trick is disarmingly simple. The girls are told they will be introduced to agencies that will get them approved work, such as waitressing. The agencies, however, are mostly run by Albanian gangsters, many of whom are illegal asylum-seekers in Britain. The girls have their passports confiscated, their families are threatened, then they are beaten or raped to get them involved in the sex trade. “Their minds are played with. So, in the end, they do not know the difference between good and bad,” says Marinca. “They no longer have values. A friend of mine worked in a shelter that was helping these girls to leave prostitution. She was horrified at what she saw and heard. The first thing most of them asked for was shampoo, as if they wanted to wash away the badness from their head. But the first telephone call they made was often to their pimp, who was controlling the prostitution. He was their main contact with the outside world.”
Once in a shelter, the girls often refuse to testify against the pimps. “Also, if they are taken out to buy clothes, they choose things that are short and shiny, because they think it is expected of them,” says Marinca. “It is, after a time, the only way they know how to dress. The whole thing has become a tragedy in Romania.” Her own family — her father is a university professor, her brother a doctor — is far removed from the seedy trade. “We want to make it a better country for everyone,” she says. Her biggest single contribution, she feels, is Sex Traffic. “It will, I hope, get people talking about a solution,” she says. “If it saves a single girl from the sex trade, then that is a start.”
According to Popistasu, this will not be easy. “I think very hard about real life in Romania and what an awful existence these girls must lead,” she says. “I know the reputation some of our girls have. I have a good home in Romania, but there is still so much to be done before any real progress is made. The girls are trapped in prostitution, and if they rebel, they are warned that their families are in danger. They dare not admit they have been tricked and dare not go home.”
Popistasu, a regular at the national theatre in Bucharest, is also a virtual newcomer to the screen. (She had a small role in Jimmy McGovern’s Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.) She, too, makes a considerable impact here. The scene that affected her most was when the sisters are ordered to strip so that buyers can assess how much they are worth. “Men were in a dark room, eating and drinking, and we had to stand naked before them,” she says. “It was only acting, and everything was done in a proper way, but it still felt frightening. We ended up holding hands because we felt so vulnerable.”
The director, Yates, makes no apology for the realism. “We are showing, through drama, what is an everyday occurrence,” he says. “This is the slave trade of the 21st century, and, so far, governments, including our own, do not seem to have the ability — or the will — to do anything about it.”
Sex Traffic, Channel 4, Thu and Oct 21 at 9pm
