Rough Trade

Don’t let sluggish reviews deter you from Trade, a depressing but haunting and powerful eye-opener about the new child prostitution racket that abducts children throughout the world and sells them to sick pedophiles on the Internet. Directed by acclaimed young German filmmaker Marco Kreuzpaintner and based on horrifying reportage in The New York Times, it follows the hair-raising journey of a 13-year-old girl pulled off her bicycle in Mexico City and funneled with other children from cage to cage, all the way to New Jersey. The film chronicles the activities of a network of conspirators who stop at nothing to meet their “deadlines”—women who lure girls with promises of jobs, bogus cops who provide fake ID’s, and thugs who assault children, inject them with heroin to keep them quiet and sell them from the backs of trucks. Kevin Kline is marvelous as a Texas cop whose own child went missing 20 years earlier, and who now joins forces with the kidnapped girl’s 17-year-old brother to find her. No spoilers here, but it will make your hair stand on end. Grim, hard to take, and nightmare-producing, Trade is not for the faint of heart.