The Price of Free

"If Paul Greengrass hasn’t thought about crafting a white-knuckle thriller about crusading Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi, the opening of Derek Doneen’s documentary “The Price of Free” — a tense raid on a New Delhi factory keeping children as work slaves — should alert social-issue directors and moviegoers everywhere how urgent and dangerous Satyarthi’s mission can be.

But also how rewarding and cathartic it is, even if the pained looks on freed children suggest lives that have known mostly need, abuse, servitude and fear. After the successful raid, in the safety of an ashram affiliated with his rescue efforts, the bespectacled, salt-and-pepper-bearded Satyarthi zeroes in on one terrified freed boy, Karim, and gets him to smile. It feels like light overwhelming darkness.

You quickly sense the optimism that fuels Satyarthi’s risk-taking and that sends him around the world to speak for children.

Probably the Earth’s foremost advocate against forced child labor, Satyarthi has been at this for nearly 40 years, frequently putting his life on the line — whether from death threats, mob violence or hunger strikes — to combat what he sees as our globalized economy’s most wretched consequence: poor children stripped of their rights to, as he lists it, “bread, play, education and love.”

The numbers we hear speak to the odds he’s up against: More than $100 billion in profits annually from human trafficking. But just as staggering is what Satyarthi’s movement has done, freeing more than 85,000 children, reforming India’s carpet-making industry and effecting a groundbreaking U.N. resolution on the rights of children, one of the most ratified of world treaties..."