How the thriller “Sound of Freedom”, about pedophile networks, became a standard for conspiracy theorists

After having accumulated, this summer, 185 million dollars (171.7 million euros) in revenue in the United States for a production budget barely over 14 million, the film Sound of Freedomby Alejandro Monteverde, was released on Wednesday November 15 in France.

This thriller on the trafficking of minors was enthusiastically awaited by part of the conservative right and conspiracy circles. For others, it is seen as a worrying marker of the contamination of the Western imagination by a vision of pedophilia that is at once religious, caricatured and far from reality.

Is this a realistic film?

Sound of Freedom tells the fight of Tim Ballard, an American special agent played by actor Jim Caviezel (The passion of Christ, Person of Interest). After saving a young Mexican from a child trafficking network, he leaves his position to try to find and free the latter’s sister.

This is fiction inspired by true events. Organized child crime is a sinister reality: the Interpol database lists 14,500 child criminals and 32,700 minor victims of sexual exploitation across sixty-eight countries.

Tim Ballard is an authentic human rights activist, known for having founded, in 2013, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a non-profit organization specializing in the infiltration of pedophile rings in Latin America and the Caribbean. The film recounts his first operation, his infiltration of the Colombian mafia, in 2013, albeit in a fictionalized manner.

The film’s distributor in France emphasizes that the director “took liberties in the representation of different methods of child trafficking”for example by showing minors detained in containers, or authentic images of children kidnapped from the street, which “do not represent the majority of cases”. In France, a third of perpetrators of sexual violence against minors are under 18 themselvesand in 95% of cases, the perpetrator is a family member or loved one.

Why is the film so divisive?

The film is centered around the OUR organization, which defends a punchy vision of the fight against pedophilia, very popular with the American conservative right, made up of hidden camera infiltration of organized networks and stunts. filmed. Sound of Freedom was thus, on several occasions and before its release, the honors of Real America’s Voice, a pro-Trump online television channel. In France, the feature film is promoted by sites located very to the right of the political spectrum, such as the conservative radio Sud Radio, the France-Soir site and Le Média in 4-4-2 close to certain “vests yellow”.

But OUR doesn’t just have admirers. The organization has been accused of staging in the past and has even “a long history of false assertions”, asserts Vice. His vigilante methods – alternating undercover infiltration and muscular intervention – are sometimes considered abrupt and approximate, or even a “disturbing amateurism”. “The problem is that it is very risky for the victims”, alerted in 2016 Anne Gallagher, founder of the UN Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons. She also regrets that their spectacular interventions are not accompanied by any follow-up of the victims: “They come in and they leave. They have no way of tracking victims, no way of assessing the impact of what they do. »

Where does the connection with conspiracy theories come from?

Sound of Freedom is not inherently a conspiracy film. But it is carried by a casting sensitive to this type of rhetoric. The lead actor, Jim Caviezel, is an ardent conspiracy theorist, who believes that US President Joe Biden is in the hands of “puppeteers”in this case the “central banks », an allusion to anti-Semitic accusations targeting the Rothschild dynasty.

Above all, the actor took advantage of the promotion of the film to accuse American intelligence agencies of covering up pedophile networks and to take up the theory of adrenochrome, a fictitious drug which would be created using children’s blood, which he had already mentioned in 2021 during a meeting of QAnon conspiracy theorists in Oklahoma. More broadly, since 2016, the American conspiracy right has become convinced that the Democratic Party is at the head of a pedophile network. She was steeped in rumors as macabre as they were grotesque, such as that of a tunnel under New York sheltering tens of thousands of captured children; furniture supplies serving as supposed code names for minors sold on the Internet; or even paedosatanist elites drinking children’s blood to concoct adrenochrome, a substance that would make people rejuvenate.

More recently, conspiracy theorists say they are convinced that the earthquakes in Grindavik (Iceland) are due to movements in the Dumbs (Deep Underground Military Bases), supposed to shelter kidnapped children.

Who distributes the film in France?

Distribution is ensured by the company Saje distribution, founded in 2012, specializing in what the Americans call “Faith Based Movies”, these faith-based films. It is led by Hubert de Torcy, a member of the conservative Catholic community of Emmanuel, who in 2023 was also responsible for Win or die, the film on the Vendée rebellion produced by Puy du Fou, Priesthooda documentary by Damien Boyer, Unplanned, on abortion, or season 3 of The Chosenthe previous ones of which were broadcast on C8, the channel owned by Vincent Bolloré.

When Sound of Freedom was released in the United States in July, the French conspiracy circles exchanged pirated versions, in English or Spanish, and were moved by its non-distribution in France, which they interpreted as a sign that it ” disturbs[ait] in high place » And “worried[était] the pedophile elites.” Eventually, there was no cabal to prohibit the release of the film, which even benefited from a preview covered by France-Soir, Le Média en 4-4-2 and Info Chrétienne. In all, Sound of Freedom was released in 226 theaters across France. According to the findings of the Worldit is mainly programmed in suburbs and outlying towns.