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FROM THE HEART Productions (important: **write "Sands of Silence" in the bottom line of the check**)

1455 Mandalay Beach Road
Oxnard CA 93035-2845

SYNOPSIS

A 15-year quest to expose the underworld of sexual exploitation and trafficking from Asia to the Americas leads world-reporter Chelo Alvarez-Stehle to the windswept beach where her childhood ended and family secrets began. As she documents the transformation of sex-trafficking survivor Virginia Isaias—a Mexican American woman whose past is engulfed in a cycle of sexual exploitation—into a resilient survivor committed to break that pattern, Chelo undertakes a parallel journey of healing and introspection as she sets out to shatter the silence about abuse in her own life.

TRAILER   

Read our IMPACT STORIES from every continent and every strata of society, from the U.N. and E.U. Parliament to women and immigrant shelters to prisons in California and Spain where victim female inmates and perpetrators male inmates' lives have been transformed by the film. Through the searing stories Chelo Alvarez-Stehle tells in her film, she demonstrates that sexual abuse and sexual trafficking are but points on a continuum.  In so doing, she has made an important contribution to the national conversation about sexual assault and rape culture.

“This film is part of the new movement of independent documentary films that reveal important truths about the terrible secrets we keep as a society and the toll they take on all of us.”                                        —Professor Jack Lerner, UC Irvine School of Law, and member of the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association.