The wisteria was succulent and blue last spring when I met an older colleague, a woman I am prone to revere, for lunch at Dupont Circle’s Iron Gate Inn. Iron Gate is a restaurant I had passed and peered into, wondering what it would be like to eat a meal under its trellis of climbing flowers. When my colleague suggested that we meet there, I felt a kind of elevation—the younger sister remembered. I arrived early, locked up my bike and smoothed my hair, and waited for her to appear through the open arched gate.

She is a tall, willowy woman, very beautiful, with pale skin that rarely registers the heat and color of emotion. She tends to dress with an ease that sets her apart from the sea of black suits, somehow pegs her as a woman who spent her better years abroad. But when she came through the gate that afternoon, her face was pink and smeary. She wore a messy striped T-shirt with slacks; her long blonde hair hung flat. She was distracted as we sat down at our table, on the verge of tears or fury as she glanced at the menu.

I have never known this woman well. Once, we shared a cab from the New Orleans airport to the French Quarter, two among a throng of anti-human trafficking experts convened for a dull conference. We had happened to walk up to the airport curb and be accosted by the same Russian cab driver, who threw our bags into the trunk of his taxi before we could say no. All the way into the city, he regaled us with a random Balkan diatribe.

“You look Latvian,” he kept saying to me.

“I do?” I have brown hair and a heart-shaped face. The association is usually Irish.

She was shaking her head in the other corner of the back seat, rolling her eyes, occasionally shouting something provocative back at him while I laughed nervously, praying for the Marriott to appear.

“I’m Latvian,” she told me, when we had safely disembarked under the hotel’s garish marquee. “And he had no idea what he was talking about.”

At the New Orleans conference, she was a woman I wanted to become: her knowledge, her confidence among men—especially Latin men, a bevy of whom arrived with tarty assistants on their arms. She was a full foot taller than several of them, and she held her height as a fact, not as an apology or confession.

Sitting under the wisteria vines at the Iron Gate, she began to cry, cough, sit tall, and then sink into her chair.

“I’m leaving,” she said, referring to the well-known international organization whose anti-trafficking efforts she directed. “I can’t watch the movies or read the studies. I don’t sleep. I have nightmares.”

“I know,” I said, not sure if I should interject.

“I can’t take the rape scenes,” she said. “I can’t take the torture. I can’t take the dramatized agony.” She was referring to the human trafficking films, documentaries, and reports that besot our professional field. Then she took a breath and found some semblance of her work self. “It has to be connected with economics, labor issues; it can’t just be this. I can’t handle it.”

I can’t even remember what we had planned to discuss over lunch, but I don’t think it came up. Our meal quickly became one of those awkward exchanges during which you try, kindly and repeatedly, to convince the other person that you want to listen to her, and that, at this moment, you have dropped the professional antecedents and see her as a human being.

As I recall, she was still somewhat flustered and embarrassed when the long meal ended, the tables around us emptying, the afternoon sun rising hot. I know that she quit her job and spent the summer in Latvia. I haven’t seen her since. I have thought of her and wondered about her, especially when I scan a child prostitution headline, delete a work email too disturbing to read, or avoid the latest trafficking-themed movie because, like her, I can’t take it.

I thought about her this past week as the documentary Call + Response opened across the country. It’s not a work of art; it’s just fun—and it is about human trafficking. Unexpectedly, it is an extended music video featuring a host of artists—Imogen Heap, Matisyahu, Cold War Kids—whose performances are interspersed by conversations with old and new talking heads.

The best of the talking heads is Cornel West, who draws the film’s lines between African slavery, call and response songs, and musical forms of protest, both past and present. Who is this man, and where did he come from? I could kiss him on the lips for being the first person to inject appropriate humor into a human trafficking expose.

I wish I could introduce him to my colleague, perhaps arrange for them to meet for lunch in that beautiful garden, and talk seriously and laugh. I think it might redeem a small fragment the sorrow she has felt.