This is behind the conspiracy theories in the movie “Sound of Freedom”

Hardly anyone expected “Sound of Freedom” to storm the cinema charts this year. The thriller has been in cinemas in the US for three weeks and has already grossed more money than Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”. The film is currently only playing in cinemas in the United States. It is not clear if he will ever come to Switzerland.

The film – which was partly crowdfunded – revolves around former US government official Tim Ballard, who rescues kidnapped children in the Colombian jungle.

The film was originally produced by 20th Century Fox. However, when the company was bought by Disney, the project was canceled. Later, Utah-based independent Angel Studios picked up the film.

“Sound of Freedom” is criticized. This is behind it:

Spoiler Warning: The following sections contain spoilers related to the movie’s plot.

“Sound of Freedom” is based on the life of Tim Ballard, who left the Department of Homeland Security about 10 years ago, created a task force and works with local law enforcement to catch child traffickers in other countries. These rescue missions were often captured on spectacular video footage.

Ballard went undercover and had only one job: to track down child traffickers. In 2014, Colombian authorities asked him to investigate a tip that children were being sold as sex slaves. “Within half an hour this person comes up to me and asks me why I’m here, what I want, and within minutes he tells me he has kids here who are 11 years old,” Ballard told CBS News.

Ballard now heads Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a non-profit organization that rescues trafficked children. After that first meeting, the Colombians asked him to start a covert operation.

The planning went on for months, then suddenly everything went fast. Within 24 hours of the agents landing, the suspected human traffickers arrived on the island and the final deal with the undercover team began.

54 boys and girls aged 11 to 18 were admitted to what was billed as a sex party. 25 Colombian special forces stormed the party and arrested five suspects – four men and a former beauty queen – all accused of child trafficking.

In the film, two siblings are lured into an innocent-sounding photo shoot in Honduras, only to be kidnapped by captors and held captive in the Colombian jungle. Caviezel’s version of Ballard spends much of the film sneaking through criminal hideouts to find the kids, risking his life and finally beating up the traffickers.

The real Tim Ballard has made no such claim, but the film ends with a montage of clips of covert operations his group, Operation Underground Railroad, actually conducted in the country. “By the time Tim left Colombia, he and his team had rescued more than 120 victims and arrested more than a dozen traffickers,” the screen reads.

Many have praised Ballard’s work, including Donald Trump. In 2019, he appointed Ballard to a State Department advisory committee on human trafficking, which Ballard served until it was disbanded the following year. Trump was also a recent guest on Ballard’s podcast, where they talked about the “Sound of Freedom.”

But not everyone is convinced of Ballard’s work. However, according to Erin Albright, a lawyer and longtime adviser to anti-trafficking task forces, Ballard and his group are not really at the center of the international fight against human trafficking. “The majority of [Anti-Menschenhandels-] The industry sees them as marginalized,” Vanity Fair quotes Albright as saying. “They publish sensational reports and raise money.”

Others accuse PLR ​​of distorting the complexities of the sex trade, doing little to help victims despite their dramatic videos, and even endangering children to produce them.

Ballard claims that 10,000 children are trafficked into the United States each year for sexual abuse. Trump made the same claim in a 2019 State of the Union address. However, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler found no evidence for this claim.

In Utah, the Davis County Attorney’s Office investigated Operation Underground Railroad for two and a half years for alleged communications fraud, witness tampering, and coercion. The investigation was closed without charge in May.

Some critics accuse the filmmakers of distorting the truth about child exploitation and endorsing QAnon conspiracy theorists.

One of these conspiracy theories claims that rich people torture children to “harvest” their adrenaline, which is said to have rejuvenating properties. This is the foundation of the QAnon #SaveTheChildren movement, which is more concerned with fabricated stories like these than actually saving child victims of human trafficking.

However, the film shows nothing that resembles this conspiracy theory, writes The Washington Post. The film’s villains are common criminals, not the shadowy group of occultists QAnon worshipers imagine. Still, the film has been promoted on QAnon’s forums, with some accusing it of playing into the hands of the movement.

That’s partly because Ballard and the actor who plays him in the movie, Caviezel, have both expressed support for some of the QAnon movement’s claims.

Ballard proposed a theory in 2020 that online furniture retailer Wayfair sold children and sometimes put them in overpriced storage cabinets. But there is no evidence for this theory, and such statements hinder rather than help human trafficking investigations.

Speaking at a 2021 QAnon conference in Las Vegas, Caviezel echoed one of QAnon’s key slogans “The storm is upon us,” which refers to the movement’s fight against the imaginary secret society of pedophiles.

The studio has responded to the allegations, and Angel Studios CEO Geesey said anyone claiming that “Sound of Freedom” promotes conspiracy theories has not seen the film. Director Alejandro Monteverde never imagined that his film would become so successful – or so controversial. “It was never my intention to make a movie that glorified Tim Ballard. It was a movie designed to draw attention to the problem,” he says. “I always thought this movie would bring people together. Instead, it seems, ‘Sound of Freedom’ reveals chasms that simply cannot be overcome.”