FictionThatMatters.org

Cinderellas, Wolves, and Prince Charming
(Cinderelas, lobos e um príncipe encantado)
Written and Directed by Joel Zito Araújo
Brazil, 2008. 106 minutes.
Screening at the MOMA Premiere Brazil film festival.

Joel Zito Araújo’s Cinderellas, Wolves, and Prince Charming is a quirky, meandering documentary film that reveals the underbelly of the cross-border sex trade of Brazil. Over 900,000 women a year enter the sex trade each year, joining an estimated 20 million modern day slaves. Lured by promises of romantic marriages to wealthy Europeans, they board planes and are quickly ensnared within violent organized crime rings.

However, the exploiters of the sex trade are not always sinister Mafiosos. They are just as frequently boring middle-aged European males who travel to the country for sex. Some prey upon minors, while others seek a few weeks of unbridled companionship with prostitutes. Through numerous interviews with sex workers and sexual tourists alike, Cinderellas exposes the pernicious stereotypes which perpetuate the trade in a country suffering from poverty. The battle to end the sex trade will not just begin with stopping the traffickers, it will also entail debunking age-old myths of the exotic.

The filmmaker Araújo interviews everyone from ‘exotic’ black Brazilian dancers in Italy to street children on the beaches of northeastern Brazil. He consults with human rights workers and senators, probing for solutions to this pervasive issue. Few are forthcoming.

The Cinderellas, the Wolves, and the Princes

The Cinderellas: impoverished young Brazilian women who seek a better life. The Wolves: international traffickers or, typically, middle aged upper-middle class white foreign males. They arrive in Brazil offering fine goods, platitudes, and hollow promises. When their vacations end, they return to Europe without their erstwhile lovers. The Prince Charmings: the well-to-do white men who swoop down to Brazil, marry a woman several decades their junior, and provide them with a stable home life abroad.

The sex trade accepts all, both whites and blacks, but blacks are purportedly more sought after for their sexual powers, exotic features, and congenial temperaments. At least that’s what the patrons think. Both the European (or American or Canadian or Australian, but we’ll just say European because it’s easier) males and the Brazilian women profess a distaste for their own kind. The Brazilian men are too macho, too rough, and cheat on them, the women say. The European women are too needy and sexually unsatisfying.

Hair Dressing

The most endearing scene unfolds in a hair salon. As a flamboyant stylist irons the curly hair of his young transvestite client, they chat candidly about the dreams and stereotypes of Brazilians in the northeast. When light-skinned women or men can’t land a trick, they blame blacks for their features and poverty. Men traveling from Europe are too horny to even realize that the young transvestite is a man. At times humorous and at other times insightful, this unusual onscreen duo captures most of the themes in the film: why Europeans like black Brazilians (figure and sexual reputation), why Brazilian women are drawn to Europe (security and opportunity), and the pervasive traps that can ensnare them. Indeed, the conversation in the hair salon could easily have made for a complete short film. The rest of Cinderellas merely provides supporting evidence.

Message in a bottle

Cinderellas is not a film with a message, and that is why it is so effective. One is left with a comprehensive picture of the myriad of factors that fuel the international sex trade. While some of the perpetrators — such as an American child molester living in Salvador da Bahia — do deserve scorn and punishment, other circumstances are more ambiguous. What would you do if no matter how hard you worked at an honest job, you couldn’t support yourself or your family? Especially when working the streets pays so much more? And can you blame someone for wanting a stable relationship, free from poverty, even if it is with a European male who more or less purchased her love? The successful Prince Charmings wield almost total control over their spouses upon their arrival in Europe, making each of the ‘successful’ depicted marriages seem inherently fragile. But are those marriages any less fragile than a dependent single-income marriage in Europe?

Brazil Evades

Brazil is an enormously complex society. For every tendency that can be observed it is possible to find its exact opposite. Many of the themes teased out in this film – exoticism of blacks, sexual exploitation of minors – also apply to men. And there are plenty of Brazilian women who prefer Brazilian men to Europeans, or Brazilian men who prefer morenas (mixed race women) over blacks or whites. There is indeed abject poverty, but there is also extreme wealth.

This is all too much to pack into a single documentary and Cinderellas can already use some light trimming. The film feels complete after 70 minutes, and the rest — while informative — strives in vain to hold your attention.

What is being done

Still, much is being done to combat the sex trade in Brazil. Efforts are being made in the legislature and police occasionally lend a hand by punishing the middle men or the trafficking rings. The United Nations Office of Drug Control has declared human trafficking a priority. The U.S. Department of Justice has also been fighting battles against traffickers, winning an important victory in Los Angeles in February 2009.

But Cinderellas shows that these solutions will also require a changing of attitudes. It is not just a question of poverty, but also eradicating the ‘exotic’ myths of the preying wolves.

–Deji Olukotun