Expired July 12, 2021 6:59 AM
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Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Sundance Institute, and The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation.


This free screening will be accompanied by a Zoom conversation with filmmaker Lizzie Borden, sex work activist Antonia Crane, and artist and producer Coco Ono moderated by filmmaker Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli on Thursday, July 8 at 4 PM PT. Once you register for the screening, your confirmation email will include a link to the Zoom meeting.

Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.

  • Year
    1986
  • Runtime
    93 minutes
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    United States
  • Director
    Lizzie Borden
  • Screenwriter
    Lizzie Borden & Sandra Kay
  • Producer
    Lizzie Borden & Andi Gladstone
  • Filmmaker
    Lizzie Borden
  • Cast
    Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin
  • Cinematographer
    Judy Irola
  • Production Design
    Kurt Ossenfort
  • Composer
    David Van Tieghem