Sound of Freedom: The film you almost never had the chance to see
Madeline Fry Schultz
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When Eduardo Verastegui learned about Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization that works to save children from sex trafficking, he knew he wanted to tell its story. Specifically, he wanted to tell the story of Tim Ballard, its founder and CEO.
Ballard had spent more than a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. When he realized that there were real children who couldn’t be saved without cutting an impossible amount of government red tape, he left in 2013 to create OUR, which boasts 4,000-plus predators arrested and 6,000-plus survivors recovered.
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In addition to aftercare and preventative efforts, its website notes, the organization goes “to the darkest corners of the world to assist law enforcement in rescuing children.”
Statistics on human trafficking are hard to compile, but the State Department reports that it has 27.6 million global victims. Many of these are children, and many of them are continuing to be exploited right here in the U.S., not just through physical violence, but also a seemingly endless supply of child pornography. (OUR claims that “Americans are some of the top consumers AND producers of child pornography.”)
So when Verastegui, a film producer, heard about Ballard’s story and the problem of child sex trafficking in the U.S., he thought, “I am a filmmaker. I ask myself, ‘What can I do?’ A movie. I have a weapon of mass instruction, and inspiration.”
At the premiere of the finished movie, Sound of Freedom, in Washington, D.C., Verastegui told the Washington Examiner that this all happened eight years ago, so even after the film was finished in 2018, there was no one who wanted to distribute it for years. Netflix passed. Amazon passed. Every studio was worried about losing money.
“That,” Verastegui said, “broke my heart.”
He said that people who saw the film cried; some gave it a standing ovation. But the “experts” didn’t seem to get it. “Something’s weird here,” he said.
It didn’t matter that Sound of Freedom focused on high-stakes drama, showing Ballard (played by The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel) and his partners working with local government officials in South America to lure pimps and pedophiles and rescue the children in their clutches before it’s too late — like if Taken were based on a true, gut-wrenching story.
Then Verastegui met Neal Harmon, co-founder and CEO of Angel Studios, last fall. Angel Studios is the crowd-funded media company famous for distributing The Chosen, a TV show about the life of Jesus Christ. A few months after meeting Harmon, Verastegui pitched Angel Studios on the film, and things moved quickly. After the studio showed the film to investors who were enthusiastic about the project, it agreed in March to distribute Sound of Freedom.
Jordan Harmon, brother of Neal and co-founder of Angel Studios, told the Washington Examiner that in fewer than 10 days, some 7,200 people invested $5 million in a fund to get the movie “out into the world.”
Now filmmakers are hoping that the movie, which comes out Tuesday, July 4, will draw 2 million viewers at its theatrical release to represent the 2 million children trafficked globally. But they emphasize that the point of the movie isn’t to preach to its viewers.
“When you go to a movie and you buy a ticket, you don’t go to be preached at; you go to be entertained,” the film’s director, Alejandro Monteverde, told the Washington Examiner. “So my goal as a filmmaker is how can I take entertainment and marry it to meaning?”
Monteverde describes himself as a “lone wolf,” saying the people the filmmakers originally tried to partner with for the film didn’t understand its meaning — until Angel Studios.
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“As a filmmaker, as a storyteller, I realized that a lot of my peers were doing one type of a film as a voice — not as a genre, but as a voice,” he said. “I realized that I wanted to go in a different direction. I wanted to make films that I was called to make.”
The film’s eight-year journey from an idea to a two-hour-long product ready to be released in theaters has been anything but orthodox. Monteverde admits that even the release date — July 4 — may be risky, but as a self-proclaimed underdog, he welcomes the challenge. “The bigger the giant, the greater the glory,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Bring it on. Let’s see what happens.’”