Just out of rehab with the motivation of wanting to start a family to motivate her continuing sobriety, Mia (Ilaria Borrelli, NIGHT SUN) takes a plane to Cambodia in search of her businessman husband Xavier (Philippe Caroit, WORKERS FOR THE GOOD LORD) only to discover him in a brothel with eleven-year-old Srey (Seta Monyroth) who was sold into prostitution along with her little brother by a stranger when loggers in the countryside caused the death of her grandmother. Recovering from a bout of despair, Mia decides to rescue the girl from the brothel, allowing Srey's owner Sanan to prostitute her to a client in order to buy the girl's freedom. Hoping that her little brother has run away to find their father, Srey makes her way with Mia in a stole truck towards the border. Mia discovers that Srey has stowed away two other girls and she agrees to help them get back to their villages and their parents knowing that they are now being pursued. Sanan has leaned on one of his clients to bribe the police to find Mia who he claims is an addict who has kidnapped his children. Along the treacherous journey, Mia learns the horrors that Srey and her friends have endured and the stigma that being a child prostitute carries even among their loved ones. Written and directed by actress Borrelli, THE GIRL FROM THE BROTHEL (also known as TALKING TO THE TREES) was sponsored by UNICEF and Amnesty International, and is as much drama as documentary (Borrelli's anthropologist/documentarian husband Guido Freddi produced the film and composed the score). Some of the drama late in the film seems forced, with Mia temporarily turning on Srey out of a sense of betrayal as she contemplates her husband's betrayal possessing dramatic verisimilitude but seeming shoehorned into an already tense third act for the sake of another complication. The issues the film raises, however, are compelling and the film was released at a time when the horrors of human trafficking were getting more international exposure; as such, the film can be forgiven for straining for dramatic effect and framing the issues within the story of an empty woman finding a cause greater than herself.