UnionDocs Newsletter

Saturday, March 3 at 7:00pm, 9:30pm. $9 suggested donation. $15 double feature. Filmamkers and activists Anna Saini, Erika Smith, Paul Silva, PJ Starr and Kyisha Williams in attendance for discussion.

Join the Sex Workers Outreach Project-NYC (SWOP-NYC) and Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK) as we celebrate International Sex Worker Rights Day by showcasing the fierce activism of sex workers in an exciting night of film.

Whether it is by taking to the streets in protest, delivering vital services to our fellow workers or simply reclaiming our stories and our lives, sex workers are transforming communities and having our voices heard.

We will begin the program with a diverse selection of short films that highlight the activism of sex workers in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and here at home in NYC. Then we will focus our gaze on the actions of sex workers in India, a motherland of sex worker activism where March 3 events originated, with our feature length showing of Tales of the Nightfairies. This film explores the power of collective organizing and resistance of 60,000 sex workers in Calcutta. A panel discussion including filmmakers and sex worker activists is part of our action-packed event.

SWOP-NYC and SWANK proudly acknowledge the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival www.sexworkerfest.com for sponsorship and assistance in curating this inspiring night of film. Film night program developed by Anna Saini and PJ Starr of SWOP-NYC.

This film explores black/racialized/criminalized/queer/trans identity and its relationship to the prison industrial complex. It articulates links between interpersonal and systemic violence – while celebrating the (sexy) ways in which we survive and celebrate ourselves.

Video and supplementary documents are designed to spark discussion and create inspiration for looking at the ways that peer-led groups providing support and services to sex workers in their communities can collaborate with harm reduction agencies.

Sex Workers and Anti-Trafficking (trailer) by Carol Leigh, USA 2012, 18 min.

Anti-trafficking is a sacred cow, but behind this humanitarian concern is a century-old movement that historically reflects xenophobia and prostitution abolitionism. When Carol Leigh first heard about the resurgence of the white slavery/trafficking framework, she knew she had to show how this moral panic has historically resulted in discriminatory immigration policies, increased criminalization of sex work and few solutions for individuals who are victims of forced labor. This trailer introduces Collateral Damage: Sex Workers and The Anti-Trafficking Campaigns with a summary of Trafficking in The Media: Sex, Power and Representation.

Sex workers in Cambodia respond to the MTV Exit Campaign against trafficking and exploitation.

Rights Not Rescue by Open Society Foundations (Producers: Paul Silva and Pamela Chen), USA 2010, 9 min.

Sex workers are subjected to widespread human rights abuses, including police violence and unequal access to health care, in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Despite enormous challenges, they are organizing to protect their rights and demand an end to violence and discrimination. A report published by the Open Society Institute, Rights Not Rescue, is based on a series of interviews and focus groups with sex workers and advocates throughout the three countries. In this animated short film, sex workers who participated in the research tell their personal stories and collectively call for hope and change.

Ni coupables, ni victimes by Sexy Shock in collaboration with the ICRSE, USA 2005, 5 min.

“Ni Coupables, Ni Victimes” is a video record of the words and actions of sex worker and ally participants at the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour Rights and Migration. Media activists SexyShock and Scarlot Harlot were invited by the ICRSE to create a “video booth” at the “European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour, and Migration 2005”. This made it possible to film participants willing to be on camera while protecting the identities of those who did not. Interviews were made with conference participants who are sex workers and allies. Interview segments are blended with images from the street demonstration, performances and images with Scarlot Harlot and text taken from the Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto.

Anti-prostitution laws have a devastating impact on many communities as shown by this work in progress which exams how one woman came to die in a US prison after being arrested for “solicitation.” The documentary when completed will chronicle how a movement was formed around this case, one that seeks both justice and rights for sex workers.

Times are hard in Sexxxys town, the cops harassing, the stroll not paying and a new law is being drafted that will ruin things for everyone. With a little help from her friends she finds stability and success until an unexpected betrayal challenges her comfortable new existence. A political education puts her in the drivers seat but she cannot help but be torn by the decision she has to make.

Tales of the Nightfairies by Shohini Ghosh (with Support from the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, Delhi, & MAMACASH (Amsterdam), India 2002, 74 min.

Five sexworkers – four women and one man – along with the filmmaker/narrator embark on a journey of storytelling. Tales of the Night Fairies explores the power of collective organizing and resistance while reflecting upon contemporary debates around sexwork.

The simultaneously expansive and labyrinthine city of Calcutta forms the backdrop for the personal and musical journeys of storytelling.

VAMP Responds to “Prostitutes of the Gods”, India 2010, 3:43 min. (Produced by Sangli Talkies, the newly-launched video unit of SANGRAM / VAMP)

This clip by the Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP, Prostitutes’ Collective Against Injustice), encapsulates a succinct response to ‘Prostitutes of God’, a sensationalized and factually flawed documentary produced by Sarah Harris for VBS TV. Countering the distorted perspective in the film, women from VAMP present their incisive views about sex work; religion and faith; livelihoods; issues of consent; ethics and cross-cultural sensitivities while making documentary films.

Kyisha Williams is a radical, Black, queer, high femme, ma’star, sex positie vibrant, survivor, fighter, writer and film/video maker. kyisha is a community organizer and support worker who does work with Black/ queer/ trans/ racialized/ crimanlized/ HIV+/HCV+ communities. kyisha has used art as a means of survival and celebration since her was sixteen. kyisha has an honours degree in policy and human rights. Red Lips (Cages for Black Girls) is her first video work.

PJ Starr, filmmaker and human rights advocate, explores the complexity of sex workers experiences via documentary and fictional film projects. She will comment on the impact of the prison industrial complex on sex workers and people profiled as prostitutes (such as transgender people) and detail the community organizing around these issues in the US that she has captured on film for her work in progress No Human Involved.

Paul Silva is a senior communications officer for the Open Society Foundations, where he focuses on health and human rights issues. He is a former board member of the Positive Health Project, a nonprofit organization in New York that provides health services to vulnerable populations, including people who use drugs, sex workers, and transgender individuals. Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations, he worked in media relations for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union and the reproductive rights group Catholics for Choice.

Anna Saini (panel moderator) has lived many lives as a political scientist, radical activist and multi-media artist. She completed a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto and McMaster University respectively. She works as a community organizer on issues of equality in higher education, drug policy reform, prison abolition, women’s abuse issues, police brutality, and labor rights. Her writing appears in Bitch Magazine, make/shift Magazine, various journals and in her self-published anthology Colored Girls. An interview with Anna appears in the book “Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism!”

PRESENTED WITH:

Sex Workers Outreach Project New York City [SWOP-NYC] and Sex Workers Action New yorK are both grassroots organization and part of a national network dedicated to improving the lives of current and former sex workers/those with experience in the sex trade in the New York metro area, on and off of the job.

The Cambridge Turn in Documentary Filmmaking with Scott MacDonald

We will be showing rarely seen work by John Marshall, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Robb Moss, and Stephanie Spray.

For several years Scott MacDonald has been working on a pair of projects relating to documentary filmmaking in Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Cambridge Turn, a critical history of the development of ethnographic film and of personal documentary in Cambridge and A Critical Cinema 6 (The Cambridge Turn), interviews with filmmakers who have taught and made films in Cambridge and/or have studied filmmaking there. During this process MacDonald has discovered or re-discovered a good many accomplished, but under-appreciated films and videos. MacDonald will be with us to present a 90-minute program of this work.

Living with Peter is an early personal documentary in which Weinstein struggles with her desire to be married. She knows she wants the security of marriage, but also feels that marriage is, in some sense, about her fear of freedom. A rarely seen premonition of Ross McElwee’s work.

Over the course of his career, filmmaker John Marshall shot more than one million feet of film and video (722 hours) of the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung Bushmen) of Namibia’s Kalahari Desert. Marshall produced twenty-three films and videos and one multi-part series from his extensive footage archive.

A Joking Relationship depicts a moment of flirtation between N!ai and her great-uncle Tikay. The two share a “joking relationship,” a Ju/’hoan kin relationship which provides opportunities for casual intimacy, emotional release, and support.

In this short film, Ju/’hoan women rest, talk and nurse their babies while lying in the shade of a baobab tree. This film is a good illustration of “collective mothering” in which several women support each other and share the nurturing role.

Drawing its title from a poem by the Nepali poet Lekhnath Paudyal, who depicts the monsoon season as sublime and blissful, this video focuses instead on the melancholy and grit of two female Nepali field hands as they carry out their monsoon routines in Lekhnath, Nepal.

Alfred Guzzetti combines academic and filmmaking careers. He has been working as an independent maker of documentary and experimental films and tapes for more than 35 years. His film Air won first prize in the experimental category at the 1972 Chicago International Film Festival.

Moss’ idyll about a group of river guides navigating the Colorado River has rarely been seen -ironically because its candidness about the body seemed to offend audiences in the early 1980s. Now, it seems a breath of fresh water!

Scott MacDonald is author of the on-going series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, now in five volumes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 1992, 1998, 2004, 2005). His Avant-Garde Film/Motion Studies (Cambridge University Press) was published in 1993; Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (California), in 1995; and The Garden in the Machine: A Field guide to Independent Films about Place (California) in 2001).

In recent years, MacDonald has published three books on institutions that have kept alternative cinema alive: the companion volumes Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society and Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 2006), and Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (California, 2008). His articles and interviews have been published in Film Quarterly, The Independent, Artforum, October, The Chicago Review, American Studies, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), Feminist Studies, and other journals. His newest book, Adventures of Perception (California), a collection of essays and interviews, was published this year.

For thirty years MacDonald’s passion has been introducing students and public audiences to the worlds of alternative cinema. In 1999 he was an Anthology Film Archives Film Preservation Honoree for his service in helping to preserve the history of alternative cinema. He has curated film events at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), at Anthology Film Archives (New York), at the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), at the Chicago Historical Society, and at many other venues. He has taught film history, American literature, and American studies, and programmed film events, at Utica College of Syracuse University (where he is Professor Emeritus), and at Hamilton College, Bard College, and Harvard University.

This project is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (www.NYSCA.org www.eARTS.org).

Nightfairies and Radical Hustlers: Sex Workers as Activists

The Cambridge Turn in Documentary Filmmaking with Scott MacDonald