Jean Lee

Describe your background in community and/or social action causes.

It was so humid the Saturday when I went to visit Kevin and his mom Ann, that even the stick figures some kids had drawn on the bus windows were melting. I shifted the combined weight of my borrowed camera, tripod, and voice recorder to my other shoulder as the doors opened and more people packed into a crowd radiating of urine, sweat and stale perfume.

I was on my way to Kensington, North Philly to work on my senior honors thesis, a documentary on Philadelphia’s sex trafficking industry, the third largest in America. A 30-minute ride from my Quad college dorm room, Kensington is a place many Penn students have never heard of, let alone visited. But for my friends, Kevin and Ann, this is home. For the police of the 24th and 25th districts, this is one of the most crime-ridden parts of the city. And for the pimps, prostitutes, and johns from all over the Mid-Atlantic states, the K&A is one of the fastest and easiest places to “pick up a trick” on any given day of the week.
When I got off the bus I was drenched with sweat. The outfit I had cautiously picked out the night before, a pair of long, loose jeans and a logo-less black t-shirt, felt encumbering in the heat. Yet no matter how modestly I was dressed, I was just another female walking “the strip,” which, to the drivers scouting up and down the K&A, could only mean one thing.

This was only a little over one year ago. I was 21 years old, at least 7 years older than the average girl on the street. After interviewing people from social service organizations, the Department of Justice, the Philadelphia Public Defenders Office, and people in the sex industry, I learned that most of the sex workers in this area are American born runaways or orphans, many of them trafficked to Kensington from other states by their pimps. The more I researched, the more I learned about the lack of programs and funding available for sex workers who needed psychological treatment and wanted to leave the industry.

I had only met Ann a week earlier when I decided to interview some of the residents in the area about sex trafficking in their neighborhood. A black woman in her 40’s, Ann, just like her neighbors, hated the “hookers, pimps, and the filth they brought” to her community. Having spent months prior only focusing on the sex workers as victims, I was surprised to hear her and the other Kensington residents speaking about the girls as the perpetrators.

Ann later told me about a 6-year old neighborhood boy who had contracted HIV after stepping on one of the many discarded heroine needles “the girls” and their pimps had littered on her lawn. I saw the pain and anger in her eyes. Once Ann had shared, many of her neighbors followed. On my first trip to Kensington, I listened to their stories for nine hours straight.

During this time, I realized that the residents, like the sex workers I had interviewed earlier, also felt rejected and ignored and believed that no one cared about their problems. My presence there gave them hope that with a camera, I could provide them with an audience who might have the ability to create change.

After my next few visits, Ann had told me that if I really wanted to see what street life was like, I had to talk to the “young ones.” The drug, sex, and arms industries in Kensington are all interwoven and no one knew more about this tangled mess than the kids.

When I finally reached my destination, I saw Ann sitting on her front porch, smoking a joint. I set my equipment down as I gave her a hug before she went inside to get her 22 year old son. After a few minutes of yelling, a disgruntled, tossle-haired Kevin came out, still half drunk from the night before.
On that humid Saturday in August 2008, I went to Kensington to follow Kevin around his childhood haunt, an infamously violent area of North Philly called “the back block.” “Take care of Jean and don’t be an ass,” Ann yelled at us as we walked away.

When we turned onto a street full of faded graffiti, I took out my camera to get some shots of Kevin walking past the pink, blue, and red painted walls that reflected in the sunlight. We weaved through alleyways and side streets as he recalled certain memories and childhood friends.
Suddenly, I heard voices above my head, “hey you! You makin’ a movie or something?” “Yeah,” I said, looking up at two teenage boys hanging out of a window. “Something like that.”

“This for what…HBO? MTV?” “No,” I replied. “Just me.” Their faces fell, though they continued to watch me with curiosity.

That day, Kevin introduced me to people on his street and told me stories of his “brothers,” friends who had been in the drug industry and were consequently shot, incarcerated, or murdered. The names of the dead were written all over the backboard of a nearby basketball hoop like engravings on a trophy.

As evening fell, Kevin introduced me to his eighteen-year-old friend, Andre. They took me to a side street where I soon realized they were holding guns for some gangsters in the area. Their warning calls of “squalie” and “yaya” echoed down the alley whenever a cop passed by. Both Andre and Kevin knew a great deal about prostitution and sex trafficking because young sex workers would always wait in the same lines they waited in for drugs.

While we sat there, we got to know each other better. They asked me questions about my life, my background, and my education at Penn. They had never been to Penn’s campus or anywhere near it, though they had lived close by all their lives. Suddenly, Andre asked me in a very direct manner why I had taken an interest in them, and what kind of difference I could possibly make in a world as “cracked up as this.”

His question to me sounded like a question about purpose. I told him that in order to answer his question, I first had to define the function of a filmmaker. After thinking about this, I came up with very simple definition: a filmmaker is someone who tells a story and has an audience. I told him that I wanted to tell meaningful stories about social justice issues to audiences who might otherwise never know or even hear about them. Though at the time I felt like I had given a half-baked answer, he seemed to accept my response, and mentioned that he had lots of stories, just no one to tell them to since not many people would listen.

Since then, I have kept my relationships with my friends from Kensington, and, though my film is finished, I often visit just to hear their stories and show them that I care. Looking back on this experience, I am still surprised that I was able to receive so much financial and moral support from people within and outside of the Penn community. Having had no experience in film financing, directing, shooting, or editing, I began with the simple desire to do some good.
And now, after seeing how much I can do with a small, handheld camera, I am even more determined to use cinema as a powerful advocacy and educational tool.

What current issues are of interest?

Currently I am focusing on issues of labor and sex trafficking, issues of gender violence, police brutality and the Burmese refugees camps in Thailand and Cambodia.