By Maggie Cassidy

More than 8,000 miles from home in a country whose language they didn’t understand, Greg Mills and Dan Christopher found themselves somewhere they’d never imagined going: the entrance to a brothel.

“Do you want a Thai lady?” asked the man at the door.

Usually at brothels in Thailand, men choose from “menus” featuring photographs of prostitutes. However, at this parlor, girls stood in a line for customers to hand-pick.

Christopher, a senior political science and psychology major at Rutgers, chose a girl and brought her to a small room in the back. But once they sat down, their business was not sexual.

“We made it known that we did not want to sleep with her, we just wanted to talk to her,” said Mills, a junior cinema studies major.

Mills was in Thailand as part of Global PACT, a program that sends students abroad to work on problems in troubled communities by creating projects that address specific issues.

“When traffickers come to rural communities and just pay money, they’ll offer $2,000 for a child,” Mills said. “These people basically just assume that their children are going to go work in a sweatshop or something, but nothing like being a sex slave. They don’t even think that’s a possibility.”

With that in mind, Mills and Christopher’s group, Ta To – which means “wide eyes” in Thai – focused on Thailand’s human trafficking crisis, which includes child labor and prostitution, and agreed on their weapon of choice: documentary film.

At the brothel, with only a small video recorder and a series of questions scribbled phonetically in Thai, Mills and Christopher questioned the girl after she agreed to answer questions for a fee of 500 baht – about $15 in the United States.

“Dan started interviewing her while I was over by the door holding it closed,” Mills said. “We brought back-up [support] that came in later in case things went down. If they saw us with a camera they would probably hurt us pretty bad.”

Upon returning to the United States, the pair sculpted 13 hours of film into a 20-minute documentary called “Wide Eyes” that recently premiered at Rutgers and Northeastern. They said they hope to expand the movie and return to Thailand to make a full-length film in the future.

A powerful tool

Mills and Christopher are not alone in their use of documentary filmmaking. More Northeastern students are using documentaries in attempts to convey a powerful message.

“Nowadays, you need more than a book or more than a photo,” said Jovian Lee, a senior cinema studies and communication studies major who filmed documentary footage in South Africa. “I think you need the closest thing to living it without actually doing it, and that’s film or television.”

Gerald Herman, a professor of history and education who teaches History in Media, a course where students film a documentary, said he agreed.

“The power of documentaries,” he said, “is that they allow you to look at aspects of the real world with a focus and attention, and to give you a sense that you’re in that real world, whereas the power of a dramatic film, you always know that you’re one step away from that, and it’s been filtered through screenwriters and actors who act the parts.”

He said advancements in technology have spurred an increase in the number of documentaries made, including those by students.

“When I started we were still cutting film with scissors,” he said. “Now all you have to do is go to YouTube.”

For his documentary, Lee went to Grahamstown on a different Global PACT trip, but filmed out of his own motivation. He focused on the Eluxolweni Shelter, where needy and abandoned children can find shelter, clothes and support.

“It was just a really amazing, amazing program. To see the massive class differences – you have this beautifully rich town that’s got Rhodes University, and then surrounding it you’ve just got miles and miles of shacks and dirtiness and poverty and it was really sad to see,” he said. “And then just to see a shelter like Eluxolweni, which allows kids to come in and start up a life.”

He is still editing footage but hopes to make a 20-minute film to show people the problems in South Africa and the ways shelters like Eluxolweni are alleviating them.

“Even right now, talking about it, it can’t do it justice at all,” he said. “It just works out better because you get to