 Hello, welcome to Clock Talk, I'm Crystal here on Tuesday morning. So we have a pretty heavy topic today, sex trafficking, but we have a very interesting and creative way to dive into this topic. Why so? Because I've met this very, very cool guy who actually is a writer, director, producer, you know, a visionary, who based on his true experience as a soldier has catapulted him into the creative world to translate these experiences and perspectives on it. So with no further ado, please say welcome, my cool new buddy, Brayden, Brayden Yoder. Welcome. Thanks for that introduction. Well, you know, what am I going to say, I just met this dude who actually I should share that we shared the producers lab at the Creative Lab in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, was it? Yeah. 20 to the 24. Yeah, a very intense workshop on our creative projects and I think that was really cool and I learned a lot about Brayden and being a local boy, but having gone to Iraq and then spending time in India for this sex trafficking story and then moving to L.A., you're just a worldly guy who has a perspective that maybe a lot of people don't really come close to. So we'll start with trauma. I know it's a heavy one, but that's what kind of started your path into exploring these subjects. Why so? Well, as you said, I was a soldier and when I left the military, I needed to find a way to get over what I experienced in Iraq and try to turn that into a positive and then that eventually led me to a writing degree, which turned out to be a therapeutic. I didn't realize that it would have that those benefits actually. I just thought, well, what am I going to do now? I'm not going to be in the army anymore. How long were you in the army for? Four and a half years, but before that, you know, it was four years of college too. So I was doing ROTC. So, you know, for eight, eight and a half years of my life, that was my identity and it changed, you know, obviously when I decided I was going to leave and I wasn't going to continue on in the military after Iraq. So I thought, well, you know, I'd always been a good writer in high school and I never took it seriously, but okay, let's go and see about that. And it had the added benefit of, as I said, being very therapeutic. So I'm a big believer now in people needing to find an outlet to process their experiences, whether it's just someone listening to you or finding a way to turn it into something creative, I think it's very important because we all have a story to tell and we want people that, you know, the story doesn't exist unless someone's willing to listen to it. So you find a way to get it out and there's benefits to that and that led me, ultimately led me to India. Was there any big story when you were in Iraq that triggered your creative side or? I think just, well, my writing started, you know, when I left because I was trying to make sense of it all. When I was there, I was obviously asking questions. I was emailing back home about the occupation and what we were doing there, some things that were going well and other things that weren't. So just asking those kind of questions, but when you're in it, you can't really do that. You know, it's like being in a relationship or being in something where, you know, it's only when you get out of it that you can sort of have that perspective. So I moved to Australia because obviously I needed to be in English-speaking country and when I was in Australia, I did my creative writing degree and that's when I was able to process all of these things. Okay, so why did you choose India? You stayed there for several years? I did. Well, so just getting out of my comfort zone and going to Sydney, I met friends from India who told me about this national film school of India. At that time, India was sort of taking off in the public consciousness, like Time Magazine had put an Indian woman on the cover, I think in 2006 or 2007, it was like India Incorporated talking about Bollywood and things that were just really interesting. So having that personal connection with different friends from India who were there in Sydney and then just kind of being interesting in the public consciousness and then just being interested in Asia in general, I was like, okay, let me go check this out. So why sex trafficking? I mean, is it something to do with the trauma kind of concept from when you were a soldier? No, I really kind of stumbled into that. Really? The first rule of writing is to write from what you know. And so when I got to India and I realized, okay, I'm going to be here for a long time, I need to find a story that I can access. And I didn't know what it was, so I just started to engage in the community. Because obviously all my friends at the film school were already Indians, so they already knew what story they were going to tell. For me, the only story I could tell at that point was someone who had come to India. So I needed to spend some time in the community. And I ended up linking up with a friend, she had come to do her master's in social work, I believe, and she was studying sex trafficking. Okay. And she was only going to be there for a couple of months. And through her, I said, well, let me go and tag along. And through her, I got access to this organization, Sahayli. But this is a crazy world, right? Sex trafficking. I mean, did you have a preconception of? I had no idea. And I had no idea it happens in this country. You know, I mean, that's how I naive. Exactly. And I think, you know, now in the press, people are catching on to this. I've been seeing more and more articles about this in the LA Times, New York Times and things like that. But I had no idea. This was 2008. So this was January 2008. And so this was even a year and a half before that book, Half the Sky, was published, which did talk about sex trafficking through Asia. And of course, I was very naive. You know, I went down to this sex workers collective in the middle of the red light district in Pune. Did they think you were a potential customer, honestly? No, I don't think, I mean, because, again, I went with my friend, Edith. And then I had access to the administration of the group. The collective, what they did was they advocated for rights for sex workers that weren't there for these, quote unquote, fallen women. What does that mean, like rights? Rights such as being able to, so one of the services they provide, for example, and the way I first got involved was they ran a crushed nursery for the children of sex workers, which, you know, if you've seen born into brothels, I mean, the children can understand the brothels and they can hide underneath the bed or they can find a place to go. And that's what Sahayli did. They provided a nursery for these kids, and I just fell in love with these kids. So I would go there once a week and play with them, but the other services they provided was like a bank, for example. So that way when a woman can no longer perform this work, yeah, they're almost like microfinance in that sense, just that they could set some money aside and then they could, you know, invest it and do things with it in a way that they couldn't in polite society. I want to go back to you being involved with the kids at the, I think we have a photo, actually, of you hanging out with a bunch of boys there. Are they mostly boys? Are they boys and girls? Boys and girls, but their hair was cut so short because of the okras, the lice, so like you didn't want it to, you know, to jump around. Okay, but for me, that's the most shocking repercussion of trafficking that people don't tend to see. They always think, okay, the victim, the woman, and what's going to happen to her, but they don't think, oh my God, there's a whole other generation of offsprings from these victims and what do people do with them and how are they treated when they grow up? So was that like a big opening, eye-opening attitude? What was really eye-opening was how much the mothers cared for their children. And that was something I didn't expect. And in some cases, these women that we interviewed. So, you know, Ines, my friend, she was doing interviews into this. And so I got to be privy to some of those interviews. And that's the link for me, was the trauma that they had experienced and the fact that someone was asking them, was giving them that outlet. They were able to talk about this trauma of leaving their home, of being kidnapped, or being tricked into this life. I recognized in their need to tell the story, the same need that I had to tell my story after coming back from Iraq. And what was really interesting was to find out, I didn't expect that they would love their children, you know, that these were bastard children, right? And yet, in many cases, these children gave them the strength to survive. They weren't just focused on themselves anymore and their own pity of what happened to them. They made their peace with it and they were able to focus on their children and I want to make sure my kid has a better life. Which just blew me away, you know, and again, not knowing anything about the culture. My first question was, well, why don't they just go home, you know? I mean, I was there in the red light. I could see that you could just leave it any time. But of course, you can't really, you know? But in some cases, the women did go home. And the parents wouldn't take them back. To find out about the whole Save the Girl Child campaign in India, the idea that a girl child is a burden to the village. No matter what had happened to this woman that got her into this life. In some cases, she was married off and then it turns out her husband's mom was a sex trafficker, right? And then turned around and drugged the girl, sold her into slavery somewhere else in the country. It's a tough topic to talk about and obviously, people in India, when I did my documentary there, the organization was very, very excited about it because they had something that they could promote themselves. But other people were not very happy that I was looking into this, you know? Okay, sure. Because there are a lot of bad guys out there who are trying to control this whole industry, right? Well, I think also just culturally, the idea that- Don't talk about it. Well, that and just the idea that how's a foreigner going to look into this and in a superior sort of position, which is not what I was doing. I've been working there for three years. I wanted to tell the story there. But then that led me to kind of think, well, we have this going on in our country too. Absolutely. And obviously, it happens quite a bit as well. So it's just become an interest and a passion. And I never, like I said, never expected to go there. So I was going to ask you is how did they treat you? If you were an outsider and you're also a man and usually their world is so protected within themselves, that how did they open up to you or did they not? It just took time, you know? Okay. It was probably two to three years. Were they curious about you? Did they learn about you and was it a reciprocal relationship? Well, I wouldn't say I developed any relationships with the women who were actually working in the red light. The people I built relationships with were the ones who were working at Saheli advocating for sex workers. Right. So some of them were Indian social workers. Some of them, the Thai, which in that language meant sister, they were retired sex workers who were now trying to advocate for safe sex and other precautions that these women could take so they wouldn't be at the mercy of the Johns. Those are the people that I really formed relationships with. Did you try to understand why the culture is the way it is and how they treat the women coming from a Western perspective? I did. And it's tough to talk about in the sense that we have our own issues too. Like I was saying, you don't want to be judgmental. But it seemed that from all the reading that I've done, there's the Madonna and the whore complex where a woman can either be this very chaste and pious person or she can be the fallen woman. But the idea of having a normal sex life and enjoying that was not there. As much. And so, and which is really interesting because this is the land of the Kama Sutra and all of that. But that was what came back from all of the things I read about sex trafficking and the attitude when I was there. And that was very interesting. So some of the women that we interviewed talked about, some of them were just lonely. And they wanted to just talk. They felt very lonely in their marriage and they actually paid the women. And these women were very county so they knew how to provide that outlet for the man. Rather than providing any sort of services for. That sounds like something that's relevant here too, yeah? I mean for a sex worker in the West. I think you do whatever you can to survive. And it just opened my eyes to have all the respect in the world for these women that are working at Sahayla and a couple men that were there to social workers. But trying to advocate for better rights for this red light district, for the women of this red light district. It was very eye-opening and inspiring for me. I mean, how does it change you as a person? You've already been changed by being in Iraq and seeing life-death situations. And then you throw yourself into the red light district in India and you see this. It made me a much better person I think because everybody's got a story, but there's always someone out there who's got it worse than you. And to have that perspective and to learn about another culture in a very raw way was very inspiring for me. It made me a much better person. Do you feel the need to use that inspiration and that knowledge into your creative work? I mean, not to just spill it out and try to educate people in a hard sense, but do you want that underlying knowledge? Yeah, I do. I think for me, going to Iraq and having this clash of cultures in a negative way, to be able to turn that on its head and have a clash of cultures in a positive way by engaging is something that I'm much more interested in. I'm much more interested in building bridges than walls. OK, so speaking of bridge, what do you think the similarities of trauma, let's say, from a soldier's point of view is with the trauma experienced by a sex trafficked woman? Yeah, it's really hard for me to speak to that, right? But from what you see or felt during that time? Yeah, boy. I mean, I guess the thing for me really was just the fact that they needed to tell their story. I mean, I was like, use the example of your mother, right? And when you were going through your pregnancy, you want to talk about something really mystical and interesting is happening to you. And it was very sacred and specific to you. And imagine, you know, no one asked you about being pregnant, right? And here you are doing something that's amazing and going through this experience. Everybody who's gone through some sort of trauma, some sort of experience, whether it's positive or negative, needs to find a way to get it out. Right, right, channeling. To channel it. And that's, you know, so these women were very happy to want to talk to us and do these interviews. And that was that was the spark that I recognized. And the need for storytelling is a way to heal. Well, there you go. We go back to the concept and the need for storytelling. Absolutely. And that is so important. So when we come back after a quick break, we're going to talk about how you threaded this into your storytelling. It's really fascinating to see somebody with such a rich experience and throwing it into your own creative product. So come back. We're going to talk about rated stories. 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Join us every other Monday at 3 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Back here on Quark Talk, I'm Crystal talking to Braden Yoder about the creative channeling of not necessarily traumatic, but something so deeply felt. And to let it kind of translate and channel into creative processes. And Braden's just working on a really interesting story, but you have so many projects. Let's go and specifically talk about the one that you have that's relevant to your experience with the sex trades and that. Sure. Can I talk about my thesis film first? Sure. And how that experience informed it. So the film that I ended up taking back from India Breakdown in 2013 was shot in the old city of Pune. And all of the research and all of the time I spent there really informed the characters there that we created. So in that story, an American who knows nothing about that culture ends up falling into this old city where nobody speaks English, except a couple different people. And he ends up, like the old film Noirs, taking a misstep and slowly tightening the noose around his own neck because of his lack of understanding of the local culture. And the opposite for him is the heroine or the anti-heroine is a dance bar girl who has been trafficked. And for her, she's looking for agency. The film's really about power. And thinking about power and how those kinds of things, those relationships work in that world has been on my mind ever since. To see how these men could dominate these women. In some cases, these grandmothers who were dominating these women, as I said. It's just an interesting, I mean, it's tragic, but it's really a fascinating look at human behavior. So having that experience and then coming home, I started to think about trafficking, as I said, in this country. And I didn't really know it existed, so I started reading. And then the more reading you do, the more you look at YouTube, people, these testimonials, you find that the story is pretty much the same all around the world. The faces are different, but the story is the same. Was he an actress in your film, or was she a? She was an actress from Maharashtra, native Maharashtra, Marathi girl. And she loved it, you know, and she was able to bring her own experiences too. I mean, that's the thing about film, too, is even though I can create the overall apparatus, the actors are gonna come and bring their own thing too. Simptakas are gonna bring their own thing too. And that's what I love about it, you know? So in that case, she was from the local culture herself. So as far as I could get with the local culture, she could get the rest of the way because of having grown up in it. And so my current project, then the one that I took to the producer's lab is called White Indians. And the story follows a traffic Navajo girl who leads a broken army vet on a healing journey home, takes him away from Las Vegas and ends up taking him on a healing journey to the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona. And the story there, she's really her story. She's the heroine. But it was a way to look at the links for trauma between two characters and a way to talk about the need to be able to tell your story and that the road to healing really runs through other people. You know, you go through a traumatic experience and you want to withdraw maybe and just be by yourself. But really the way to do it is through other people. And the Navajo I have a lot of respect for, I went out there, I have a co-producer who's Navajo who's been involved with me from the beginning on this. And they're a very ceremonial culture. They actually have ceremonies for every major thing in their life, including coming back from war. There's a PTSD story, I mean, ceremony rather, to help people process that. And the idea that- Well, it's interesting that they acknowledge the implications of this trauma, which is something that is not supported enough. I guess I hear as the criticism with the US is all the soldiers coming home. Is this, where's all the post-treatment or support? Yeah, well I think the problem is, you go off and you experience this traumatic thing collectively as part of a tribe, as part of this platoon or company of soldiers. And then you come back though and you get out and you're on your own. Right. And so what I really admire about native culture is just that tribal, we're all in it together, way to look at it. And that's what the Holy Guy, the soldier in the film is missing, the vet. And that's what Joni, the heroine, ends up rediscovering it as well. So she's been trafficked, she's been cut off from her tribe. And as she finds her way back to her tribe, she takes him along and helps him understand that, as I said, the road to healing runs through other people. Is there an underlying statement that you want to address that there is a lack of us seeking help from people in the spiritual way or somebody who's there for you but you don't wanna embrace that? There's something there? Well I think, for me, the most important thing, as I said, is learning to tell your story. But a story doesn't exist unless there's an audience for it, right? And so if people don't know how to ask you about your story and to be present to your own experience, then it's like you might as well not even tell that story, right? Like the story, it's almost a story that didn't exist, like a tree that fell on the forest and nobody heard it, right? I think being sensitive to other people's experience and being able to share those experiences is very, very important, whether you're a soldier or whether you're a stay-at-home mom. Everybody has something to tell and they want to be able to get it off of their chest and know that somebody acknowledges it. I think that's important. So in the characters in this film project, the main character, what is his name again? Cam. And then the main parent is Joni. Joni. So does Cam, does he stem from experiences of close friends of yours? I mean, where did this character come from and how does he see this sex trafficked woman? I mean, to see somebody that represents our bigger view or judgmental view of what a prostitute is, you know, what her world is? Yeah, absolutely, partly. Plus, she's an underage girl. So of course he doesn't look at her that he can learn anything from her. Right. And he's an amalgam of a lot of guys that I knew who came back and had difficulties readjusting. Yeah. Do you think it's a guy thing to not be able to confront your feelings? I mean, of course you have the PATSD but in addition to that, right? Yeah, absolutely. I'll just speak for myself. Like I said, I didn't ever think that this was something that was important. And when I went on to teach creative writing for a few summers and a semester, you find that the girls are always much more ready to talk and ready to write. Right. And the boys have to have it, you know, try to figure it out with them a little bit. Yeah, you know, and it's, I don't know how that works, but I know that from my own experience, I didn't know that this was important until I had gone through it and I needed to find an outlet for myself. And so that's why I said, I am an advocate for it now. So when I was a teacher, I would challenge the boys in that sense, like as a coach, like the way they need it to be, to really be able to get in touch and talk about the things. How would you suggest that though? How do you educate somebody, not educate, forget that. How do you get somebody, a guy to get in touch with their feelings and to embrace that conversation? Come on, let's get some tips. There's people out there who have no, like, you know. I don't know if I have any tips for anybody, but I just know in the classroom, you know, as I said, the girls are much more willing to journal and to do those kinds of things. And boys need to be challenged, you know, and if they respect the teacher, the male teacher or the female teacher, but the way I would try to engage them is as the way like a football coach or a basketball coach would engage them and challenge them to really get it, you know, dig deep and go there. So women don't need to dig deep necessarily. They always are really digging. I think women are, well, again, I just, I don't want to make it to generalizations, but I think, but in my experience, the girls in the classes that I taught were much more mature than the boys. Obviously, we all know that. Sure, that's high school, right? That's high school, but that's just general, I think. Yeah, boys never grow up. But they were much more introspective and ready to share these experiences. And I don't know if they were just more sensitive, but if I needed, you know, my best writers were always the girls, without a doubt. But going back to your female character in your film, how did you find her character? Did you associate her greatly with your experience in India with the sex trafficking? Oh yeah, absolutely. So, you know, like I just said, we did interviews. We did, and these interviews were like two to three hour long interviews and we have transcriptions of these interviews. So taking those interviews, looking at interviews with women here, with girls here who had been trafficked, and there's actually quite a few different organizations that are working to end this kind of plague in our society. Do you think we can end trafficking, seriously? I hope so. I mean, I think that that's the goal. You know, I'd like to see a world where this doesn't exist anymore. Well, in an ideal world, but in a realistic world, I just don't see that in the near future. But having said that, what is like the second best thing to support women who are victims of this trade? Other than the education, the sex education, maybe you wanna talk a little bit about that or? Yeah, I don't know, Crystal, actually, I'm a little... Because it's in our lives, right? Well, you just said that, you know, it's prevalent in Hawaii even. You know, teenage girls who are just abandoned from whatever reasons are out there susceptible to being victims and it's just crazy. So how do we even make these steps to kind of help change this? You know, I'm not sure, and I wish I had some of those kind of answers, but I think to talk again about my white Indians kind of relate it back to the script, it's just the idea that we're all connected. Yeah. It's important, you know, and that it's not, you know, competition that's gonna get us there, but really cooperation and collaboration, you know. So rather than looking at, you know, turning a blind eye to certain things, I think just knowing that we're all connected is probably an important way to help make some change. And the fact that you're embracing two very heavy issues in your film with the trauma and the trafficking, it's a hard place to go. And you have to get there if you're gonna write it, right? Yeah, well it was the most honest thing that I could have written at the time and I'm proud of the project and I hope that we can actually make it into a film. Yeah, so let's talk about your vision now. For the film? Yeah. Well, so we're gonna go to the American film market in November, as you know, and so hopefully between now and then we'll put together some sort of package that when we go there and we meet different sales agents, we can hopefully, you know, get some more conversations. Going, this is, you know, it was deliberately written as a low-budget film, so something which in that case means less than a million, but in our case means less than, you know, $400,000, right? Yeah. And we're obviously looking to try to find a good actor who can help with the distribution. So anyone out there who wants to support this project, what's the title, working title? The title's White Indians and the metaphor for White Indians comes from a phenomenon in the 17th and 18th and 19th century where white settlers who were grandfathered into the tribe never wanted to return to white society. They became white Indians. Wow. So there's so much in your story. I wish you the best of luck. Anybody out there who supported, who's cooperating in this project, thank you so much for sharing. And again, be sensitive to things out there because they might affect you and how you channel it in a creative way is even more important, the healing process. So thanks for enlightening us on that. Thanks for having me. All right. See you next time.