queer.red presents: A collection of shorts where queer sex workers hold the camera and the microphone.
Together with 5 other film festivals, we will add to the cinematic variety to help reflect queerness from our vision of destigmatising sex work. Our queer identities - genders and sexualities - place queer sex workers at an intersection where the state (the so called politic) both politicizes and fetishizes our bodies. This collection of shorts represents the heart of what queer.red’s sex worker film and art festival aims to do: create a space where queer sex workers hold the camera and the microphone. This Queer & Pride we invite you to enjoy the beauty of the art of film and engage with the personal as political. A panel will follow with sex workers to discuss current politics in their contexts.
The shorts
Fuck you, Pay Me! (Mercy St. James, NL, 2024, 8’, English) Two Amsterdam window workers are rudely interrupted by the ugliest sight imaginable, The Mayor’s Erotic Prison: a building where the evil city government wants to lock away sex workers for good! Luckily their domme friend knows the perfect solution: just sit on it! Fuck You, Pay Me! is the ultimate form of the body(and butts, specifically) as a powerful tool of resistance against the oppression of sex workers everywhere!
The Whoresurrection (Beau, NL, 2024, 9’, English) Lilith, the original femme outcast and whoremother is resurrected after a particularly whore-y ritualist makes a sacrifice. Cinematic and breathtaking, the Whoresurrection is both a poem and prayer to protect and bring prosperity to all sex workers - past, present and future.
Irresistible (Barbora Kleinhamplová & Miss Velvet, Mex, 2021, 20’, English) Relationships in BDSM are centered around the issue of consent. The dominant and the submissive both have to agree beforehand on what their roles are going to entail. In role play, the actors follow a specific scenario based on the fantasies they wish to fulfill. Together they work to bring their yearnings to life, although there’s also another, lingering question: do these short-lived escapes from everyday reality have an impact on the actors’ actions after the role play ends? Can the play influence how the „slaves“ approach women and members of minorities afterwards in their daily lives? Story of Mistress Velvet introduces us to BDSM as a sphere of subversion through which an individual can bring about a broader societal change.
Skunk Manifesto (LaMetro and Lomo Maniás, Spain, 2022, 6’, Spanish with English subs) Is it through celebration and community that we can value our resilience? By placing the importance of affection and community at the center, celebrating the third birthday of being a sex worker becomes one more venue in the process of seeking to end the stigma, trauma, shame and fear that surround this job.
Indélébile/Graffiti Politique (Deep and Cheap Media & Equipe Ephemerem, France, 2021, 7’, French with English subs) Paris, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, a social movement is raging. A feminist graffiti activist group prepares an action for the respect of whores.
