What’s being touted as the first film festival in Canada showcasing movies and documentaries exclusively about sex workers is set to kick off in Hamilton.
The goal is to shift the public’s perspective about sex work, says film festival organizer and activist Jelena Vermilion.
“When sex workers aren’t being displayed as murder victims or as criminals or victims on the screen, it really allows people to engage with their humanity at a deeper level,” said Vermilion, who runs the outreach group Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton.
American activist Carol Leigh, also known as the Scarlot Harlot, began the first sex workers’ film festival in the United States in San Francisco in 1999. Leigh died in 2022 and Vermilion said she felt inspired to set up a similar festival in Canada.
“We hope that people’s hearts and minds will be changed — and for the better,” she said.
Kathleen Cherrington, a critical sex work studies researcher at York University, said these types of film festivals take place in many other countries, but this will be the first on Canadian soil that she knows of.
“These types of events are crucial for amplifying the voices and stories of sex workers, fostering understanding and empathy in the community and challenging harmful stereotypes,” Cherrington said.
She will be attending, and encourages “everybody” to try to make it out.
Sex workers are some of the most marginalized people in society and face “tremendous amounts of violence and stigma,” said Cherrington.
Hamilton’s inaugural Sex Workers’ Film and Arts Festival will take place at local movie theatres The Westdale Thursday evening and Playhouse Cinema Friday evening. There will also be live performances and art exhibits.
Sex workers will have free admission. Members of the public can purchase tickets.
New York-based filmmaker PJ Starr’s documentary Manifesting Monica Jones, the rough-cut version, is among the films being screened. Starr will also be at the festival and cap it off with a question-and-answer session.
Starr said the film festival is important because it creates a safe space for sex workers and their allies and imagines a much different future.
“I know Jelena is a visionary, so I am excited to see what she will bring,” said Starr. “It’s very aspirational.”
Seven films will be screened over the two days. They are:
Working Girls
The 1986 classic indie hit will kick off the festival, followed by a virtual discussion with the film’s creator Lizzie Borden. Working Girls shows a day-in-the-life of an artist who is also a sex worker at a brothel.
The film is “neither a glorification nor condemnation of sex work,” wrote York University researcher Ryan Conrad in The Conversation in 2021. “Rather, it is a sober depiction of gender and sexual relations in late 20th-century capitalist societies.”
Work Safe, Twerk Safe
The new documentary is about the stripper-led advocacy group in Ontario, Work Safe, Twerk Safe. It follows the group as they launched a court challenge to COVID-19 restrictions in 2020, arguing the lockdown measures violated their charter rights.
We are looking forward to the Hamilton Sex Worker Film Festival tomorrow, where our film about how strippers were affected by pandemic shutdowns will be playing on Aug 1
—@twerksafe
Georgie Girl
The 2001 documentary follows Georgina Beyer, the world’s first openly transgender parliamentarian, serving as an MP in New Zealand from 1999 to 2007. She also was a 2SLGBTQ+ advocate, former sex worker, actor and drag queen. She died last year.
Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitution
The documentary from 2006 captures the 1989 World Whores’ Summit in San Francisco and interviews sex workers and activists from around the world who discuss their human rights.
Our Bodies, Our Business
A 2016 compilation of historical footage of the activism leading up to the Fifth International Conference of AIDS in Montreal in June 1989 when sex workers had become a scapegoat for the AIDS crisis.
The footage was captured by filmmaker Catherine Gund and includes interviews with sex workers’ rights activists who fought to break the stigma and for the creation and distribution of treatments.
The Stroll
The documentary dives into the history of New York City’s Meatpacking District in the 1980s and 90s, from the perspective of trans women of colour. They’d congregate there as a means of survival, engaging in sex work and navigating transphobia.
“I did it for this generation that’s coming up now that still do not have a broad sense of their history as a people,” filmmaker Kristen Lovell told CBC Arts last year.
“I know I didn’t when I was coming up. I had to research and learn all of this stuff — the different types of trans people in different cultures.”
The Stroll won a prestigious Peabody Award last year.
Manifesting Monica Jones
A rough-cut version of a new documentary by PJ Starr is about sex worker activist Monica Jones.
While a Arizona State University student a decade ago, she was arrested for “manifesting prostitution.”
Her conviction was later overturned when the court found she hadn’t been given a fair trial. She’s been rebuilding her life since.
She now runs The Outlaw Project that provides housing for racialized, trans youth in Arizona.