?Mar­cia Henville has be­come known for her grit­ty re­port­ing from the na­tion's crime hot spots, once even putting her­self in the midst of a vi­o­lent con­fronta­tion be­tween po­lice and res­i­dents of Pic­ton, Laven­tille.Now Henville is help­ing to bring the true-to-life reper­cus­sions of crime to film­mak­ing. She's co-pro­duc­ing a movie–cur­rent­ly be­ing shot–about drug traf­fick­ing in T&T. Sean Hodgkin­son–who made the well-re­ceived short film A Sto­ry About Wendy–is the writer and di­rec­tor of Traf­ficked.

Henville was among the cast of A Sto­ry About Wendy and its se­quel, which pre­miered re­cent­ly at the Zanz­ibar In­ter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val.Traf­ficked tells the tale of three 20-some­thing-year-old friends va­ca­tion­ing in the Caribbean who find them­selves in trou­ble af­ter be­ing wooed in­to do­ing a favour for a lo­cal man they be­friend­ed.The film is based on re­al-life sto­ries told on the pop­u­lar ra­dio pro­gramme Eye on De­pen­den­cy.

Hodgkin­son said Traf­ficked is two-thirds com­plete and is ex­pect­ed to be be­tween 40-50 min­utes long. He ex­pects shoot­ing to wrap up this month. The film­mak­ers–part of a com­pa­ny called Quirky Films–are go­ing to try to get it in­to var­i­ous in­ter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals be­fore pre­mier­ing it in T&T next year, said Hodgkin­son.He said fund­ing has been one of the chal­lenges in mak­ing the film. First Cit­i­zens Bank, the Min­istry of Tourism and the Na­tion­al Al­co­hol and Drug Abuse Pre­ven­tion Pro­gramme have so far stepped up to the plate.

"Traf­ficked is a cau­tion­ary tale. We've all seen Locked Up Abroad. But what hap­pens when the sto­ry is about our own peo­ple, who look like us and sound like us?" said Hodgkin­son via e-mail.

"So I hope that we can ed­u­cate and in­form Tri­nis about the dan­gers of nar­co-traf­fick­ing and I re­al­ly hope that some­one from Caribbean Air­lines is read­ing this so they can put the film on one of their 12 emp­ty chan­nels!" he added.

Traf­ficked is one of many lo­cal films that are in dif­fer­ent stages of pro­duc­tion this year. The Sun­day Arts Sec­tion will be look­ing at some of them over the com­ing weeks.