The brief

The Whole Journey is Hagar International's survivor programme in Vietnam. A case manager stays with each woman or child from rescue through safe housing, counselling, legal aid and training, all the way to reintegration. Hagar wanted a three-minute film that explains the programme and encourages survivors to ask for help.

The brief came with a hard rule: be careful with anything that could retraumatise survivors, and don't let the dark parts of the story take over the film.

What made it hard

The film had to show what trafficking and abuse do to people without showing a real survivor in the worst moment of their life. It also had to explain a whole programme, from rescue to reintegration, in about three minutes.

The decision that made it work

We pitched one image: survivors as mannequins. A mannequin can't move and can't speak, which is how abuse and trafficking leave people feeling. It also meant no real survivor had to be filmed.

The film opens in black and white. A mannequin stands alone by a river at night. Another sits in the corner of a dark room. The statistics appear over them. Then a thin red line, Hagar's colour, drifts into the frame. The mannequin becomes a young woman. She walks out of the gate, down an alley and into Hagar, where a case manager is waiting, and the colour comes back.

The rest of the film follows her through Hagar's work: counselling, a cooking and baking course, and finally sitting for a portrait in Hagar's own photo campaign. It ends on Hagar's hotline and one line: when healing happens, the cycle of trauma stops.

On the shoot

Everyone on screen is an actor, including the young woman and the people in the photo shoot scene.

Who this kind of film is for

NGOs and agencies working on trafficking, violence, child protection or mental health, where the story has to be honest but the people in it have to be protected.