CLICK HERE to pre-order your tickets to see Sound of Freedom on July 4 and be part of the 2 million people in the theaters on opening day, representing 2 million trafficked children this year. 

Most of our readers are already familiar with Tim Ballard, the former Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who left his job to found a new organization (Operation Underground Railroad) dedicated to efforts to combat sex trafficking around the world, particularly in rescuing children. But even if you already know something of his story, you’ve never seen it told like this.

From the very first frames of Sound of Freedom, a new film from Angel Studios that portrays a chapter of Tim’s life, I was both haunted and compelled by the subject matter and the style in which the story was told. With a directorial hand that was deft and deliberate and careful never to show too much, the viewer is drawn into a world where the stakes could not be higher because the victims could not be more vulnerable.

The film begins with a father in central America whose children are stolen from him under the guise of an opportunity to break into show business. Your heart can’t help but sink into your stomach at the thought of where those children are headed and that that this could be someone’s reality, but it is the reality for millions of families all over the world.

That reality is too hard to live with. As a viewer, it tears you to pieces. As a Special Agent, a similar helplessness tore Tim to pieces, but as his character says in the movie, risking everything to save these children is his “one chance to put the pieces back together”. This film is an origin story for a very brave man and can hopefully be the catalyst for a very important movement.

I sat down with writer/director Alejandro Monteverde (Little Boy, Bella) to talk about how this film came to be. Interestingly enough, he began formulating a screenplay on this subject matter before he had ever heard of the man who became its protagonist.

“It was late at night”, he says, “I was writing another project…I always liked to watch Dateline or 20/20—real things that are happening. There was a piece on child trafficking. It shook my soul. It really shook my soul. Not only because of the horror of child sexual exploitation, but also because I didn’t know about it.”

“How come I didn’t know about this? It was completely news to me.”

The next day, he woke up on a mission. He started doing research and decided to write a fictional story on this topic. He was weeks into it, when he got a phone call from his producer, Eduardo Verástegui.  “He asked me ‘have you started writing the screenplay?’ ‘No, I’m still working on the treatment.’ ‘Well, stop. Before you continue, I want you to meet Tim Ballard. Why don’t you google him and call me back.’”

“This is the kind of story,” says Monteverde, “where reality surpasses fiction.”

And he’s right. I pre-screened the film with my parents and we couldn’t stop commenting on how much courage it would take to go into these places where Tim Ballard has been and do all that is portrayed in this film. In this origin story, Tim pursues the rescue of a young girl, on a journey that takes him all across central America, to places where someone wouldn’t hesitate to hold a gun to his head, but where he won’t back down because the person whose life hangs in the balance is too important to give up on.

The script of this film is truly phenomenal, as are the performances from Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ, The Count of Monte Cristo), who plays Tim, and Bill Camp (12 Years a Slave), who plays Vampiro; a former drug runner who has redirected his efforts toward smuggling exploited children to freedom. In one particularly moving interaction, Vampiro describes the experience that made him so drastically change his aims in life. He was faced with the harrowing costs of his lifestyle in an unexpected way, but from the depths, felt God call him towards a redemptive path. “When God tells you what to do,” he says, “you cannot hesitate.”

In that moment, Tim knows what God is telling him to do, despite such severe perils on the path. In a response that is something of a theme for the film, Tim says, “God’s children are not for sale.”

The film’s director remembered that line impacting him deeply as they filmed the scene. “He said it with such conviction that it really, really hit me. There’s so much depth in that. No one can disagree with that. Whether you believe in God or not, God’s children are not for sale.”

No doubt the line’s impact came not only from its general meaning, but from the particularly personal meaning it had for Jim Caviezel, who said it.

After finishing production on The Passion of the Christ, Jim and his wife wanted dearly to have children, but couldn’t. Then, “we had this little miracle”, he says. “There was this little boy who had a brain tumor who was 5 years old and I saw this picture of him and this lady asked me, ‘would you adopt this little boy?’ And I said, ‘yeah’, but what I was really answering to was the voice from the boy that I heard in my heart that said, ‘Will you love me?’”

“I’ve got three kids that I adopted”, says Jim, “any second those kids could’ve been taken. There are dangers that kids go through in adoption agencies all over, globally—So, when I was doing this movie, I felt that so hard. My heart was on fire.”

He too brought up the scene that I mentioned above specifically and said, “I kept thinking about my children. And he says, ‘when God tells you what to do, you don’t hesitate’ My heart was on fire and you can see if come out of my eyes.”

The subject matter is very personal to Jim Caviezel, but in reality, I hope that it feels personal to us all.

Alejandro Monteverde said that most of the child actors in this film (whose performances are astounding) didn’t know the full breadth of the subject matter that they were portraying, for their own protection. But partway through filming, one of the mothers chose to tell her 13-year-old daughter (who plays an 11-year-old in the film).

“She came out crying,” says Monteverde. “Adults are supposed to take care of children, why would they do the opposite? Children trust people. We’re supposed to care for them, whether we’re their parents or not.” This story should be personal to us all because the children of this world are our stewardship.

As Caviezel put it, “God loves the most innocent. These children are the most innocent and they represent God in the most beautiful, profound way because they are without sin. They are so holy. And so, this wounds God’s heart to the core.”

Monteverde said the production team didn’t lose sight of the impact and import of the story they were telling even under somewhat grueling filming conditions. “It was a very ambitious project. It just keeps growing and growing—we started in an office and now we’re in the Amazon.” That latter setting involved location shoots that required snake gurus with anti-venom available at all times. One of the more prevalent snakes in the area had venom that could kill in 10 minutes.

They shot six days a week in mud and jungle rain, but “the people working on the film gave their all. Nobody was looking at their watches. Everybody gave themselves,” says Monteverde. “The whole film, every day, we knew that we were part of more than a movie. It was a movement.”

So, what does that movement look like?

“You don’t go to the movies to be preached at”, says Monteverde, “You go to the movies to be entertained, but my goal is—can I entertain you in a meaningful way. I like to make movies where the movie really begins when the movie ends. When you leave the theatre, you feel changed.”

Angel Studios is campaigning to have 2 million people in the seats for Sound of Freedom on its opening day, July 4, to represent the 2 million children trafficked this year. Supporting this film in its opening weekend sends a message to other theaters and to the studios that this subject and this type of filmmaking matters. The better a film does in its opening week, the more theaters choose to show that film, the more people will see it and awareness of this will spread.

The more people that are activated on this subject, the more voices there will be to rise up on questions of legislation related to it, non-profit efforts, and preventive measures. There is a direct relationship between making this matter to more people and more children being saved from such darkness.

And this film is not just an important one, it’s also good. This isn’t a film that you support for its message even though it’s a little hard to sit through. It is cinematically exceptional in its script, direction, acting, and visuals. It’s the most compelling film I’ve seen in a long time.

Getting the distribution and attention this film deserves on that release date is no easy task. “If you’re talking about David and Goliath, it’s David and Goliath on steroids,” says Monteverde. “We’re smaller than David and the giant is bigger than Goliath. I just feel like all of our audience is the stone.  If we all show up and really support this film, then we can continue to make films of this quality.”

Monteverde expressed how difficult is it to make an inspirational film on such dark subject matter. His method of dealing with that dissonance was to make light a character in the film. Even in the darkest scenes, “there is a ray of light coming and piercing the darkness. There’s hope,” he says.

It’s easy to walk away from a movie like this, and just feeling gutted about the horrors of the world we live in, but don’t forget that ray of light. We can be that ray of light in our own spheres. We can’t all go out and do something as direct and brave as Tim Ballard did, but through our small acts of courage and kindness, we defy the wave of darkness that threatens to permanently define the world we live in.

Perhaps your next small act could be filling one of those 2 million seats on the Fourth of July. It’s a day that, in America, celebrates freedom and those that have fought to give it to us. But so many in the world still aren’t free. There are more people in slavery now than there were when it was legal. Celebrate freedom by being part of the movement that’s still fighting for it.

Find out how to get tickets to Sound of Freedom HERE.