“The Price of Free” – Screening and Q&A
In collaboration with The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and The Sanders Theatre at Harvard University, we hosted “The Price of Free,” a film screening and a conversation with Kailash Satyarthi, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
“The Price of Free,” is a documentary about Kailash Satyarthi’s fight against child labour and exploitation.
“The Price of Free” (winner of Sundance’s top U.S. documentary prize) was a feature directorial debut by Derek Doneen, after working on prior projects with producer Davis Guggenheim. The gripping film begins with a police raid in a “factory” site in New Delhi where Kailash and his team are tipped off about young boys working. The film portrays the reality of young enslaved people “working 16 hour days labouring in fields, quarries, factories, domestic servants, with toxic chemicals or at brothels.”
Satyarthi founded the organization Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) in 1980, which has gone on to free more than 90,000 children from forced labor. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for his work.
During a discussion following the screening, we spoke about the physical and mental health toll on the 152 million children forced to work in factories, brothels, and other dangerous settings in countries including the U.S. He shared success stories of a few of the children he has helped, including a young man in India who became a lawyer and took on an exploited girl as his first client. Satyarthi encouraged the many students in the audience to educate themselves about child labor, and to demand supply chain transparency and accountability from companies.
