Wednesday, April 19 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
WORKING GIRLS
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1986
Famed feminist filmmaker Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls gives us an intimate, potent, and humorous look into the day-to-day lives of the sex workers in a small brothel in 1980s Manhattan. Borden was inspired to create Working Girls after hearing about the sex work experiences of the cast and crew from her iconic dystopian film Born in Flames, released in 1983. She gathered research from her peers on set and held interviews with other sex workers and their clients. With this perspective Borden gives us insight into a world where sex work is humanized. The film’s middle-class brothel — a set constructed inside Borden’s own loft and shot on 16mm— is not a place of extravagance, but just an almost-normal place to go to work. Arrive for your morning shift, argue with your coworkers about who must deal with the peculiar morning regular, and barely have time for lunch between clients. Our lead Molly — lesbian escort, photographer, and parent — takes us through her workday. She kills time in between clients by talking with her coworkers about their degrees, their aspirations, and if their partners know where they really go to work. They chat about dreaded regulars and compare notes on the “nice” ones. The workday is laced with banal interactions with men and an overbearing boss who asks too much and gives too little. This quotidian approach to a ‘salacious’ subject baffled and angered many reviewers during Working Girls’s improbable 1987 theatrical release courtesy of real-life scum pit Miramax (!), but latter-day viewers have come to appreciate how Borden transformed the male gaze to make us see prostitution in a different and more empathetic light. (TV)
93 min • Alternate Content • 35mm from private collections, permission Janus Films
Preceded by: Trailer for “Working Girl” (Mike Nichols, 1988) – 35mm
NEXT UP: Runaway Train on Monday, April 24 at the Music Box Theatre