directed by Achim Dev and Simon Nasht, Australia, 2021, 84 min., original version with Italian subtitles
 

The Australian Police Force’s “Task Force Argos” specialises in undercover operations to save children from on-line sexual abuse. This is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of crime in the world and the strategies employed by the criminals in question are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Led by determined Inspector Jon Rouse, the Argos team sheds light on the murky reality of sexual abuse on minors, infiltrating global crime networks and hunting down the worst molesters, in search of vital clues capable of helping them to save the young victims. But the advent of social media and smartphones has given children a tool to create and to share their own content with anyone in the world, thus offering the criminals another way of gaining access to their prospective victims.

Trailer: vimeo.com/581048738

Akhim Dev is a successful creative producer with over 20 years experience in the field of television and of digital content. He has worked as story producer, post-production manager and digital producer in several leading commercial television companies in Australia. His projects at the international level have been many and varied, ranging from tracking nomadic tribes in India or the largest waves in the southern hemisphere to searching for the next Bollywood movie star. His credits include writing, directing and producing The 3G of Us for SBS, Storm Surfers for Firelight Productions and The Final Sacrifice for Discovery and National Geographic.

Simon Nasht is a former political journalist with The Age and ABC. He launched an independent distribution network named Screen Impact in 2014 and DNX Media, a partnership with December Media to fund and produce long-lasting content for the global market, in 2018. Simon’s films have won him numerous awards, including the Logies, the AWGIES, the AFI and the Eureka prize for scientific journalism, and he is the first director to have been nominated for the prestigious Australian Prime Minister's History Prize. Simon has published enormously successful essays, he continues to write for digital channels, and he has long been interested in politics and education to the media. He has lectured at the European Film College in Denmark and has held conferences in numerous cinema schools throughout the world.

Statement from the director

About eight years ago I was interviewing a detainee who apprised me of the existence of massive on-line crime networks devoted to the sexual abuse of under-age minors. I very soon realised that it was not just the product of a fertile imagination but that there really was a community in ferment that celebated and exchanged massive amounts of paedopornographic material on the web. Bent on discovering how the police was addressing the issue, I got in touch with the Task Force Argos, but I had no idea that the Argos team had taken control of, and was secretly managing, the largest network of abuse on under-age minors on the dark web. Unfortunately, it was not the first time that I witnessed the devastating impact of this violence on children. As a boy, at school, some of my classmates had been lured and raped by some of the teachers. There is only one difference between that abuse and the kind of abuse that is now proliferating on the web: the Internet has enabled whole communities of criminals to join together and to coordinate their attacks. The threat to children is not the unknown stranger lurking in the park, it is the new “friend” they have made on line. The techniques may change but the result is the same: they end up having to spend their entire lives coming to terms with the trauma.

Akhim Dev

Informazioni

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Sala Cinema

Admission via the steps in Via Milano 9a