The Producers
Brian Storm - Executive Producer
Brian Storm is founder and executive producer of the award-winning production studio MediaStorm. Prior to launching MediaStorm in 2005, Storm spent two years as vice president of News, Multimedia & Assignment Services for Corbis. From 1995 to 2002, Storm was the first director of multimedia at MSNBC.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News, where he was responsible for the audio, photography and video elements of the site. In October of 1998, he created MSNBC's The Week in Pictures to showcase visual journalism in new media. Storm serves on the Advisory Board for the Council on Foreign Relations, the W. Eugene Smith Fund, the Eddie Adams Workshop, the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, the Stan Kalish Picture Editing Workshop and Pictures of the Year International.
Tim McLaughlin - Producer and Editor
Tim McLaughlin is an Emmy nominated editor and producer of documentaries at MediaStorm. He has worked on over 25 films since 2010, including MediaStorm’s first feature film, The Long Night, as well as their first prime-time television broadcast, The War Comes Home: Soledad O’Brian Reports, for CNN. His work has received recognition from the NAACP (nominated for outstanding documentary), Pictures of the Year International (best documentary project), World Press (best feature), the National Press Photographers Association (best documentary multimedia story), the Webby Awards (honorable mention) and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
Tim Matsui - Director and Cinematographer
Tim Matsui is an Emmy-nominated visual journalist and filmmaker focusing on human trafficking, alternative energy, and the environment. Tim's clients have included Newsweek, Stern, Der Spiegel, GEO, Wired and many other domestic and international publications. Today, Tim partners with non profits and corporations, and self publishes, to tell meaningful stories grounded in tenets of journalism. A non profit founder, Pictures of the Year and World Press Photo winner, and recipient of grants from the Alexia Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Fledgling Fund and Fund for Investigative Journalism, Tim seeks to inform and engage viewers through his projects, using media for social change.
Making The Film
This film began as a photojournalism project. Access was the hardest part. It took months of bureaucratic wrangling to work with the cops. Finding Natalie only happened because of my relationships with NGO’s dealing in trauma, victimization, and youth services. These were forged over years of telling stories of trafficking, sexual violence, and youth homelessness. Meeting Lisa was a stroke of luck. I walked into her world wanting to tell a pimp’s story. What I found was an amazing young woman who’s seen a lot and continues to struggle with ‘the life.’ These two young women, and the cops who changed how they police, continue to inspire. Their stories are now part of an impact campaign that’s changed regional policy and continues to grow on a national scale. - Tim Matsui
A frantic father pounds the streets, searching for his daughter. Schoolgirls, abused by pimps and enslaved by heroin, disappear into cars and shadowy motel rooms. A band of policemen desperately try to fix a system that punishes rather than protects. This visceral film follows those caught in a web of underage sex trafficking spun deep in the cracks of American society, in a gut-wrenching exploration of the lives destroyed by it.
