The 2020 Sundance Film Festival kicks off next week, and while there will be plenty of new indie movies that you’ll have to wait several months to see in theaters, some of them will be available for you to watch sooner than you think. One of them will be Lost Girls, a new thriller inspired by Robert Kolker’s best-selling true story of the same name that finds a mother (Oscar nominee Amy Ryan) searching for her missing daughter, only to uncover a sex trafficking ring that has taken many more girls, and is seemingly of no consequence to the police department that is supposedly on the case. Watch the first Lost Girls trailer below for more.

Lost Girls Trailer

Lost Girls marks the narrative feature film debut of two-time Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus, who previously helmed the Sundance selected What Happened, Miss Simone?, as well as Bobby Fischer Against the World and The Fourth Estate.

The world of sex trafficking is seedy and terrifying, so one can only imagine what it must be like to learn that your daughter may have been snatched up into it. That’s what happened to Shannan Gilbert, but the police didn’t care as much since it seemed like she was a prostitute who became a victim of the risks of her chosen career. But in a tough economy and a town hit by hard times, it’s not as simple as that, and Shannan’s mother Mari uncovers the police bias that has let many more women meet a grisly end.

This looks like an unsettling true crime story that deserves to be heard by everyone. Hopefully it can help break the stigma that surrounds sex workers and will open the eyes of those who don’t seem to understand that these women don’t deserve to be shamed and they didn’t merely get what was coming to them. They’re people, and law enforcement needs to treat them as such.

The rest of the cast includes Thomasin McKenzie, Lola Kirke, Oona Laurence, Dean Winters, Gabriel Byrne, and Miriam Shor.

When 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert mysteriously disappears one night, her mother Mari (Academy Award® nominee Amy Ryan) embarks on a dark journey that finds her face to face with hard truths about her daughter, herself, and police bias. Determined to find her daughter at all costs, Mari Gilbert retraces Shannan’s last known steps, driving her own investigation to an insular gated community near the desolate outer banks of Long Island. Her discoveries force law enforcement and the media to uncover more than a dozen unsolved murders of sex workers, young lives Mari will not let the world forget.



Lost Girls plays at Sundance this month and hits Netflix on March 13, 2020.