Maxwell Duryea was waiting for the sun to rise.
His 16 mm camera was pointed at birds perched on power lines in Chattanooga, an ordinary image at the beginning of an ordinary day. But Duryea had been warned about filming in some of the places he was visiting. Standing there with his camera could attract the wrong kind of attention.
A man approached.
“He offered me two girls for the price of one – to do anything I wanted,” Duryea recalls. “I didn’t know what to do. I just said, ‘It’s OK, man. I’m just filming the birds.’”
The man followed him toward his car.
Duryea had already spent months learning about sex trafficking in Chattanooga, hearing stories from women who’d survived it and seeing things that disturbed him. But until then, no one had offered another human being to him.
“I thought, ‘Man, there’s evil here where I live.’”
The encounter gave Duryea the title for “there’s evil here,” his nine-minute short screening in the Made in Tennessee Competition at FILM FEST KNOX in November. But the contradiction of that morning – birds on a wire, the rising sun and a man casually offering two women to a stranger – had been at the heart of the film from the beginning.
Another Chattanooga
Duryea came to filmmaking through photography and photojournalism, drawn less to particular subjects than to people doing remarkable things. One of his current projects follows a woman with multiple chronic illnesses who uses a wheelchair and is partially blind as she pursues a bucket-list goal of learning to surf.
Again and again, Duryea finds himself drawn to lives he cannot imagine living himself. That instinct led him to a project he hadn’t expected.
While working on a production in Chattanooga, a director of photography told Duryea about a woman doing front-line work with victims of sex trafficking. Duryea cold-called her and learned she’d spent years going into the streets, trying to help women and men caught in trafficking.
What she described challenged his assumptions. Trafficking, he learned, did not necessarily refer to victims hidden inside a semi and transported across state lines. People could remain in one place while those exploiting them, and those buying access to them, moved through.
Duryea asked the woman to show him. They met at 5 a.m., bought coffee and drove around Chattanooga as she introduced him to a side of the city he’d never seen.
“I saw a whole different world,” he says. “It literally felt like a whole different world.”
At one hotel, nothing about the front suggested what was happening behind it. When they drove around back, Duryea saw men drinking and smoking at 6 in the morning and women he believed they were controlling.
Then he saw a woman on her knees performing oral sex on a man.
“That broke my spirit,” Duryea says. “We finished the ride, and I went home thinking, ‘This is wrong. I have to do something about it, even if I don’t know what that is.’”
That uncertainty would prove important. Rather than decide what the film should say before he understood the subject, Duryea listened.
The voices lead the film
Duryea initially imagined making a film about a single person. But as he talked with women who had survived sex trafficking and others still caught in it, a different kind of film began to emerge.
The women who ultimately participated told their stories without cameras trained on their faces. Duryea recorded their conversations and edited the audio, allowing their words to determine what the project would become.
What he found was not a story confined to the kind of people Duryea once assumed became trafficking victims.
One woman described sexual abuse beginning in childhood.
“I was introduced to sexual abuse at a very young age,” she says in the film. “And it seems like to me that once something like that happens, they know who we are.”
Another woman describes growing up poor with a working mother and being treated as a sexual object. The pattern followed her into adulthood and four marriages, even as the men and their circumstances changed.
“One was a professional hockey player, one was a carpenter and one was a car salesman,” she says. “But they were all the same. They were all the same, just dressed differently.”
What made her susceptible, she believes, was something deeper.
“They could manipulate me because I hated myself. I always wanted to be more in somebody’s eyes.”
Another grew up outside Chattanooga without her father, angry at her mother for keeping him away until she learned later he’d been an abusive alcoholic. She says she began looking to men for the attention she was missing.
“I turned to drugs, men, sex – anything to fill that void.”
Still another describes what happens when someone on the street has nowhere to sleep.
“People know you’re on the street and you have nowhere to go, especially the dealers. ‘Come on in, you can shower here.’ And of course there’s a price to pay for it.”
She remembers wanting to die, taking so many pills and drugs that she overdosed repeatedly.
“I felt that I deserved it,” she says. “I thought sex was love.”
For Duryea, listening meant relinquishing some of the authority filmmakers usually claim over their material. He could assemble the film, but he didn’t want to presume that he could explain these lives better than the people who had lived them.
“I don’t know what being trafficked is like. I don’t know what having a drug addiction is like,” he says. “I wanted them to set the tone and tell the story.”
His job therefore became a different one: Once the voices had spoken, what images could make an audience feel what they’d heard?
A camera that cannot leave
Duryea kept returning to that first early-morning drive.
As the sun came up and Chattanooga began to wake, people were starting their days while another group was reaching the end of a night spent in an entirely different version of the same city.
“It’s beautiful, but something is off,” Duryea says. “It’s familiar, yet something is wrong.”
That tension became the visual language of “there’s evil here.”
Duryea filmed streets, traffic, a laundromat, railroad tracks and other unremarkable pieces of Chattanooga, holding the camera still and allowing life to move through the frame. Life continues around the camera, but the camera itself goes nowhere.
That was deliberate.
“I wanted the camera to be the person who’s stuck,” Duryea says. “There’s a freeway shot with traffic moving in both directions, but the camera doesn’t budge.”
The image transforms the camera from an observer into something closer to a point of view. People can come and go, cars can drive away and a train can disappear down the tracks, but the person watching it all cannot follow.
Against those images, one of the voices delivers a brutal distillation of what being trapped can mean:
“You can’t say no. The only time you can say no is that first time.”
One roll
Duryea wanted the physical process of making “there’s evil here” to involve risk, too.
He chose 16mm film for its nostalgic texture, even though he’d never shot 16 mm before. Then he imposed a harsher restriction: He’d shoot one roll, and whatever he captured would be the movie.
There was no monitor to check his work and no chance to delete a bad take and try again. Duryea couldn’t even know for certain that he’d loaded the camera correctly.
Each time something caught his eye, Duryea had to ask himself: “Is this worth 10 seconds of film or not?”
For three months, Duryea went out whenever he had the time and conditions were right, usually in the early morning or late afternoon, as darkness gave way to light or light faded into darkness. Sometimes he had only 30 minutes to wander and wait for an image that felt right.
He was also thinking about his nieces, then 14 and 16, ages when teenagers begin acquiring more independence, getting their first jobs and entering worlds their families cannot control.
“This could happen to them,” he remembers thinking.
One of the voices in the film arrives at almost the same thought from another direction.
“I have a 10-year-old niece,” the speaker says. “She has me wrapped around her little finger, and I love her to death. And every time I think of somebody in this business, I see her face.”
By the time Duryea’s roll of film was exhausted, about 95% of what he’d shot would make it into the finished film.
“When the roll was done, it was done,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘I hope this does the story justice. I hope it’s something.’”
Refusing to look away
The restraint in “there’s evil here” extends to what Duryea refuses to show.
For example, the women are heard but not seen. Protecting their identities was paramount, but Duryea found something artistically powerful in removing their faces as well.
Without a camera pointed at them during the interviews, he believed they could speak more comfortably. It also denies the audience an easy visual category for the person speaking.
One voice belongs to a 53-year-old woman who says she first went onto the street at 8 and left at 21, only to return after her husband died.
“Tired is not even a word,” she says. “I’ve been sick and tired all my life.”
Yet she doesn’t describe herself simply as someone waiting to be rescued.
“God has me out here for a reason. I know that. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. I know God has me back out here for a reason.”
Duryea was equally wary of using the film’s other tools to dictate an emotional response. He originally imagined an original score that would make the film feel mysterious. As he worked, he realized the music was interfering with the voices.
So, he threw it out, retaining little more than ambient tone.
“I didn’t want it to be, ‘Here are the poor kids. Save them,’” Duryea says. “It was more, ‘Hey, there’s this thing. Are you going to let this continue to happen in your city?’”
What happens after you see it?
Duryea has no illusions that nine minutes of film can solve what he found on that first early-morning drive.
He’s asking for something smaller, and perhaps more uncomfortable: awareness followed by responsibility.
“I want people to take accountability for the city they’re living in,” Duryea says. “I don’t want to live somewhere where things like this are happening, and if I do, I’d better be doing something about it.”
One of the film’s voices makes much the same demand without suggesting that everyone must become a front-line worker.
“Not everybody’s called to be in the trenches,” the speaker says, “but anyone who has a heart for people and sees their plight takes it on themselves to learn about it and do something.”
For Duryea, the film can only be a starting point: something that causes a conversation, prompts a question or makes an adult warn a young person that the danger exists.
It can also make it harder not to see what was there all along.