by Cassie Brummitt, Marketing Assistant
Leicester Red Project: a Blog
Fri 20 Feb 2015
a festival of sex workers on film
The Leicester Red Project is in full swing at Phoenix. This six-week film festival comprises free screenings every Thursday from 7pm, until 19th March. The short season aims to provide insight into the lives of sex workers and the violence they suffer.
Cassie Brummitt attends the first screening of the season, Personal Services, and provides her thoughts.
Sex work is not a topic that often comes up in light conversation, but festival organisers Michela Turno and Altea Alessandrini want to change that. I went along to the packed-out opening film, 1987 work Personal Services starring Julie Walters, to chat to them and the guest speakers. I wanted to get a sense of the motivations behind the festival and what makes this representation of the sex industry so important.
Before the screening, I spoke to Michela, the founder of Firefly Leicester, a community interest company that aims to explore social stigmas through cultural means such as theatre, film and dance. She explained to me her hopes for the festival: to start conversations about this most taboo of subjects, and to raise awareness of how prejudice against sex workers can all too frequently translate into violence and abuse.
It was her priority, she says, to select films that would explore different facets of the controversial sex industry.
Michela described to me the hypocrisy embedded in our cultural perceptions of sex work. There are a wide range of experiences within the industry, from starring in pornography, to street prostitution, to escort services. In Britain we claim to adhere to a no-tolerance policy towards discrimination and violence in the workplace, yet these issues are rife within sex work. In fact, a prevailing response is often that these victims deserve it, or should accept it as part of their lifestyle, or should find another profession. By refusing to confront the issues within the industry, Michela tells me, we rob these victims of a voice and a right to live safely.
This echoes in my mind as I listen to the introduction to Personal Services given by Altea, a student at De Montfort University. She tells us that sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than any other profession. This is a harrowing thought. However, Altea also wants us to understand that this violence stems from widespread ignorance of the diverse nature of the sex industry. Many audience members, for instance, were visibly surprised by her assertion that over a quarter of sex workers are non-female; our lack of knowledge about the industry, she says, contributes to negativity, stigma and violence.
I wanted to understand exactly how the festival is going to help this cause, so I approached Steve Chibnall, Professor of British Cinema at De Montfort University, a guest speaker for the Personal Services screening. Personal Services, he tells me, was ground-breaking for its representation of prostitution. Prostitutes were (and still are) scarce characters in British cinema, and – until the late 1980s – the few roles were played by foreign actresses, safely detached from prim British sensibilities. Julie Walters’ storming performance in Personal Services is a breath of fresh air.
The film is inspired by the life of Cynthia Payne, an infamous prostitute who catered to the unconventional sexual appetites of older men. Directed by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame), he delivers a film that is not a comedy but which has an undercurrent of dry, situational humour – usually directed at the unusual clientele and the bizarre nature of the sex work.
The central theme of the film is the hypocrisy which both Michela and Altea have already highlighted. Julie Walters’ character Christine is charged with the crime of brothel work, but the prosecutor turns out to be one of her clients. She knows she will escape charges, as the prosecutor daren’t expose himself as one of the participants in the crime he is supposed to be condemning.
Each weekly film will portray sex work from a different angle, but a recurring theme runs throughout: the danger of violence that is ever-present in the sex industry, and the hypocrisy of the culture we live in.