LOS ANGELES — In one haunting moment from Liongate’s upcoming thriller “Traffik,” a young woman is drugged and loaded into a waiting truck by sex traffickers after having spent much of the night running for her life. Nina Simone’s stirring “Strange Fruit” punctuates the scene, a touch that filmmaker Deon Taylor calls a “spiritual moment” intended to draw a parallel between trafficking and that other institution that commodifies people held against their will.
“I had to put that in there because (trafficking) is the modern-day slavery,” Taylor said.
“Traffik,” which was “shot with a microbudget,” was produced in part by its star Paula Patton’s Third Eye Productions.
“(Producing) is the only way to get the types of stories that I want to see made,” Patton recently said in Los Angeles. “You can’t sit there and hope — that’s infuriating and maddening. So you must create your own future.”
After small roles in the Will Smith rom-com “Hitch” and low-budget thriller “London,” Patton graduated to leading-lady status as Andre Benjamin’s love interest in the 2006 Outkast musical “Idlewild.” For the next few years she was one of Hollywood’s “It” girls,” co- starring opposite Denzel Washington (“Deja Vu”), Kevin Costner (“Swing Vote”) and Kiefer Sutherland (“Mirrors”).
A critically acclaimed turn in the Oscar-nominated film “Precious” proved to be another breakthrough, and Patton went on to headline a pair of rare rom-coms marketed toward black audiences (“Baggage Claim” and “Jumping the Broom”). She also landed in blockbuster titles both successful (2011’s “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol”) and not (2016’s “Warcraft”). But nowadays, the 42-year-old actress says she’s interested only in roles that excite her. “At this time in my life, I want to be moved. I want to be inspired, and I want to hopefully do work that moves people, as well,” Patton said. “At the end of the day, the weird thing about what we (actors) do is that it’s work and art. And to do both I feel like I have to love what I’m doing. I don’t want to just do it if it’s just work. Not anymore.”
“Traffik” came to Patton through her friendship with Codeblack Films Chief Executive Jeff Clanagan, whose company partnered with Lionsgate in 2012 to release films targeted at African American audiences. Codeblack’s most recent success was last summer’s Tupac Shakur biopic “All Eyez on Me.”
The film, which Taylor wrote, directed and produced through his Hidden Empire Film Group, was shot in Northern California’s Placer County, where the director lives with his wife, Roxanne Avent, a producer on the film. The project was inspired by true events.
