- Jamie Chung won best actress at the Seattle International Film Festival for her portrayal of a sex-trafficking victim— a character purportedly based on real life.
Eden is a 2012 film about a suburban teenage girl kidnapped from her hometown in New Mexico and taken into a warehouse outside Las Vegas, where she is forced into a factory of sex slaves headed by a crooked US Marshal. The girls live in punishing conditions. They're lined up for mandatory pregnancy tests and mystery injections. Tracking cuffs are strapped to their ankles. Their clients come from every level of American society: businessmen, fraternity guys, politicians. Assigned the name Eden, the girl we follow is imprisoned, beaten, raped, whipped, and tortured. Her only route to escape is through the ultimate betrayal, convincing sex-trafficking ringleaders she is loyal to them by becoming their madam—selling other women to save herself.
As the movie makes clear, Eden's story is based on the life of a real woman. She is Chong Kim, a noted crusader against sex trafficking. The movie premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and then played the Seattle International Film Festival, where its star Jamie Chung won the Golden Space Needle Award for best actress. At a film festival in Milan, Eden's producers and its director also won awards. For Eden's official theatrical release in May 2013, SIFF hosted a sold-out screening at SIFF Cinema Uptown. The lights went down, and the very first words to appear on-screen were "BASED ON A TRUE STORY"…
