Selling Sex in Heaven

SELLING SEX IN HEAVEN won Best Documentary at the 2006 Big Bear Lake International Film Festival. Must have been a pretty thin field.

The documentary, which originally aired on Canadian Television, is a horrorshow about sex tourism in the Philippines. As such, it follows your typical horrorshow format of introducing us to someone who lives in its milieu, then using that person’s story to take us deeper into its horrible world. By the time the film climaxes with a look into a casa, or brothel catering to Filipinos, we’re looking at a ghastly example of modern slavery and man’s inhumanity to man.

This could be, should be, powerful stuff, but SELLING SEX IN HEAVEN weakens itself by taking the viewpoint of two young Canadian interns who have come to the P.I. to change the world. When it shows us some dehumanizing facet of the sex trade, such as the mandatory weekly gynecological examinations (“For the protection of the customers, not the girls,” states the clinic’s director), it doesn’t let the scene speak for itself. Instead, it goes strait to one of the two callow young Canadians: “Ooh, all those speculums look nasty,” says one. Ok, cornfed, I’m sorry that the veil of your innocence is being lifted, but your disillusionment does not make for compelling cinema.

SELLING SEX IN HEAVEN makes another critical mistake: by misstating the facts surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from the Philippines, it calls the integrity of its research into question. The film states that the U.S. maintained a huge military presence in the Philippines for years, and that the local sex trade sprang up around it. Accurate, so far. But then, it strongly implies that the U.S. pulled out of the P.I. as a direct result of the devastating eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which significantly damaged the facilities at Clark AFB, at the time the Air Force’s largest installation in the Pacific. The reality is significantly different. First, the government of the Philippines told the U.S. to leave the islands. Second, the U.S. submitted to the will of its host country and began its withdrawal. Third, Pinatubo blew after the withdrawal was already underway. There is no correlation between Pinatubo and the U.S. withdrawal from the Philippines, and the film’s misrepresentation led me to wonder what else it might be misrepresenting.

So here’s a film that’s supposed to document the plight of some of humanity’s most vulnerable people, but turns out to be about how two nice Canadian girls learn that the world is not a nice place. Not only does the picture miss its own point, it does so while losing credibility by botching a fact pattern that’s a matter of public record. It’s too bad, because the story of the oppressed and exploited women of the Filipino sex trade is one worth telling. If only SELLING SEX IN HEAVEN was a better storyteller.