A Portrait of Prostitution, Told in Six Intimate Parts

A portrait© eentweedee produksies of prostitution, 2011 www.een2dee.co.za told in six intimate parts. We will be using the term sex workers throughout for the sake of consistency but this should not be taken as an argument for the decriminalization of sex work just as the use of the word prostitute should not be taken as an argument for the criminalization of the same trade.

ex is an integral part of every human’s life. Whether having it, not having it, wanting it, not wanting it, talking about it, learning about it, we all have a relationship, opinions and expectations around sex. Prostitution, providing sexual service for another person in return for payment, has Sbeen present in every culture in recorded history and continues to operate around the world today. What for most people is a personal practice, for a group of individuals is a trade. Since 1994 there has been an ongoing debate in South Africa about how best to protect the human rights of sex workers.

At present the South African Law Reform Commission is reviewing four proposals ranging across the spectrum from full criminalization to full decriminalization. Whilst attending a research forum around these issues earlier last year it struck me that in a room full of erudite and informed experts on this subject, from a variety of disciplines – department of health, NGO’s, academics – there was not one sex worker amongst them. The sex work trade is clearly not going to be eradicated and those who are working in this industry are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. It is a subject highly worthy of debate to ﬁnd the best possible policy solution but shouldn’t we be hearing from those who are actively involved in it? I decided I wanted to use my skills as a documentary maker to give six sex workers in Cape Town a platform for their voices.

Intentions, argument and social justice

The storytellers - SIXxSEX is a narrative feature documentary set in Cape Town, South Africa, proﬁling six sex workers. I do not want to enter into this project with a ready formed argument as to what sex workers need to better their working conditions and lives. I want to give six sex workers the opportunity to talk frankly about their experiences, what they see as problematic in their working situation and what changes, if any, they would like to see made. From this an argument towards policy development may form but I want to allow the space for this to develop organically rather than imposing a particular view.

Giving a balanced view of the sex industry is a priority for the ﬁlm. Sex workers are not all working in the same contexts and their experiences and needs will vary vastly according to their different situations. The high earner with her well-known client base and appointments that may well involve partnering a client at a social event leading to an entire night spent together is in a very different position to the street worker performing mainly oral sex for entirely unknown clients in ﬁfteen minute sessions.

A young man arrives in Cape Town with no job or place to stay and ﬁnds himself housed and fed by sexual partners. Ultimately these partners become clients as the nature of their relationship becomes so clearly transactional and our young man is in © eentweedee produksies 2011 www.een2dee.co.za 1 his own very particular set of sex work circumstances. The foreign national who turns to sex work through the negotiations of a pimp because she battles to ﬁnd other work; the young township girl looking for some fast cash, again come with their own distinct contexts and issues. The sixth story I want to include is that of a sex worker who has left the industry. I have a feeling the combination of personal experience along with the greater detachment her position allows will offer a valuable insight into the concerns of the trade.

The film will seek to accurately and respectfully represent the specific world of each of these six people, finding the places where their experiences overlap and where they diverge; where their feelings towards their work and lives coincides and where they differ.

The audience – I want this ﬁlm to give a human face to people who the public know nothing about. I want to present the stories in a way that is digniﬁed and fair, which allows the audience to recognise the fellow humanity in these six people and hopefully through this to possibly shift preconceptions or blanket judgements.

If this can help to shape thinking around policy development that would be a wonderful outcome but my main intention is to allow the people’s stories to speak as fully as they can for themselves, whatever complexities and contradictions they may throw up. I would like to think the ﬁlm will offer valuable insight for policy makers but primarily I hope that it will get individuals in the audience relating directly to the stories of the six sex workers and interrogating the issues surrounding the sex work industry.

The film will seek to represent the aspects of these six people’s lives which are shared by all people – the daily living of getting up, eating, walking, shopping, which everyone does. Sex workers are not a breed a part but people who are active in our society in the same way as people of other professions are. This will be the common thread to link all six people to one another and finally to the film’s audience.

Making of the film

Initial contact - Sex workers willing to participate in the documentary will be found through SWEAT and in the case of the male prostitute possibly Health For Men. An initial meeting will establish what the respondents are comfortable with in terms of filming: whether they want to reveal their faces or not and which questions they are happy to answer. It will also serve to find out as much information as possible regarding the habits and movements of our subjects; to help us plan a suitable amount of filming time. A large part of our interest is in what our subjects do when they are not working and in the feel, places, moods peculiar to their lives. It will be important to establish how much of their homes, work places and daily journeys they are willing to let us film.

Conversations - To get each respondent talking we will ask questions divided into six sets (listed in the synopsis). The aim of these questions is ﬁrstly to get a real sense of the humanity of each of the people; the texture of their lives and secondly, through asking each person the same set of questions to explore the contrasting and overlapping experiences and opinions of sex workers in different contexts. © eentweedee produksies 2011 www.een2dee.co.za 2

Style

My documentary making is slick and edgy – drawing on a popular culture style of ﬁlm making, I use pacey cutting, beautiful images and a carefully chosen soundtrack. This makes for a package which is accessible, aesthetically pleasing and highly engaging, particularly for younger audiences. The content however is the priority and I am aiming for substantial, nuanced and detailed portrayals of the six stories with my ﬁlmmaking style providing an enticing sweet wrapper for the rich narratives of the documentary.

The visual narrative will of course be as key as the stories the respondents tell with their voices. Those who are not willing to reveal their faces will be shot synecdochally: hands, feet walking, close ups on the fabric of their clothes, handbags, items in their homes. But whether they reveal their faces or not, visually there will be a strong emphasis on showing the personal habits and rituals of their lives that are common to most people: switching on lights, brushing teeth, cooking, shopping, driving, catching public transport.

Audience appeal

The topic of course has social and political relevance but it is also a subject that will titillate audiences. Rather like the stylistic sweet wrapper I spoke of earlier, I don’t want to deny the sexiness and intrigue value of a documentary on sex work but use this superﬁcial draw card to entice audiences into a deeper engagement with the stories of our six respondents. Once we have them captive the emphasis on humanity in combination with actively working against a moralising tone should make the six conversations communicate effectively to viewers.

Potential markets

• The film could be offered to NGO’s like SWEAT to aid in decision making around law reform. • Mzanzi | SABC 1 regularly screens documentaries and this film has a profile which would be attractive to their programming mandate. • We would submit to documentary festivals locally and internationally. Well-made and with relevant content, the film should be readily accepted.

The documentary will follow six different sex workers from different economic backgrounds and working in distinct contexts. These six conversations are further divided into six sets of questions as starting points to explore the respondents’ work and lifestyles.

SIX QUESTIONS FOR SIX SEX WORKERS

1. Good morning - Introduction: questions to ﬁnd out basic personal details around marital status, whether or not they have children and background, as well as a sense of the person’s self-regard. Then, quite simply, what are the rituals with which they start each day? 2. Home sweet home - Drawing a picture of their home lives. 3. All in a day’s work - This would make up the body of the narrative: practical questions around their work, logistics, presentation, payment, as well as their feelings and experiences of their trade. 4. Girls just want to have fun - Exploring their world outside of work. Looking at what comprises their personal lives and where they are happiest. 5. Friends and family - Investigating their intimate and familial relationships. Establishing how these relationships relate to their work; how intertwined their professional and personal lives are. 6. Sweet dreams - Here we look at the inner world of the respondent: what their hopes for the future are; how they feel about sex itself; how they feel about sex in relation to their work; their views on love, intimacy, fulﬁllment.

1. The upmarket Camps Bay sex worker/escort - Elegant and well-heeled, easily mistaken for a model, this woman never works the streets; has selected, loyal clients and is very highly paid for her services. She is in her mid-twenties, enjoys the glamorous lifestyle her work affords and does not have any children. 2. Sea Point Main Road sex worker - In contrast to our Camps Bay lady, the street is this woman’s domain and her dress code and look blatantly advertise sex for trade. She is in her early twenties, has been working for a while and has a staked territory on the strip. Her earning power is far lower than that of the elite escort and it is likely that she has a pimp who takes a cut of her earnings. Run-ins with the police are frequent and her trade is mostly with strangers. She has no children and does not live in Sea Point. She claims to like what she does, but she clearly has aspirations to a different way of living. 3. Brothel sex worker - This woman is not South African and works for a pimp. She rents a room by the week, owned by an individual she never meets but who she believes to be connected to the business. All her clients are booked through her pimp, she has a high turnover and never trades on the street. Her husband is dead and she has three children to support. With little education and being a foreign national it’s hard for her to find work that pays sufficiently. She hides the true nature of her work from her family and regrets that this is how she has to earn her living but is nonetheless proud that she is able to provide for her children 4. Shebeen good time girl - In her late teens and strikingly beautiful this sex worker lives in Khayelitsha and works the shebeens and taverns over weekends and month end. She lets the men buy her drinks and services them in their cars or in dark alleys. She wants an expendable income to spend on clothes, her cellphone – she’s looking for status symbols and this work provides her with an income to afford them. She got involved in sex work through friends who trade. She has had unprotected sex, but is too scared to go for an HIV test. As a child she wanted to become a teacher and the sense is she still has many dreams for a grander future. She has a regular client that promises to teach her how to drive. 5. Green Point male prostitute - Early twenties, good looking and a great dancer, he picks up his clients on the dance floor and goes home with them. He escaped a restrictive and judgemental home life to come to Cape Town, the pink city, and found that in return for sex he could get a bed, food, pocket money and a degree of paternalistic care. He likes the club life, the drugs, the partying but still there is an underlying loneliness and a desire for a personal connection with people that is not based on mutual using. He is possibly in love with one of his clients. 6. The ex sex worker - A woman that used to be a prostitute and is now not anymore, and what she thinks of it in retrospect. She could have been working in any of the contexts above. We explore why she got out of the game and what her life is like now. The emphasis here would not be on ‘how the prostitute made good’ but rather to get an idea of her opinions on how best to protect prostitutes. We want to get the perspective of someone who has insight into the trade from working in it but also a degree of distance and reflection now that they are out of it.

DIRECTOR | PRODUCER •Daréll Lourens is a director producer with a keen eye for detail in storytelling. She has directed numerous music videos and Television Adverts and also insert directed for the highly acclaimed South African journal Program 'Kwêla'. She directed and produced „Blissfully Lost” – an international feature length documentary ﬁlm dealing with HIV and perceptions of the disease among youth in Western Europe and ‘Sleeping Water’ for IFAS in France. She recently completed production on the documentary “Kinross”, ﬁnancially supported by the National Department of Health and the Educational Support Services Trust.

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EDITOR •Milton Schorr is a writer, director and producer. Beginning his career in theatre, he has created many theatrical productions at venues all over South Africa. Since starting in film three years ago he has created two short films, various television commercials, and the documentary “Kinross: The Journey of a Town” along with Darrell Lourens of Eentweedee Produksies. He is currently at work on a feature length screenplay under Matthys Mocke of The Tradewinds Film Corporation, as well as the feature film of one of his theatre projects, ‘The Game’.

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STORY SUPERVISOR | WRITER •Alex Halligey works as a writer director and performer. She writes for a daily radio soap opera, Radio Vuka, ﬂighted on SAfm and is currently co-devising and directing a new play for Magnet Theatre. She has acted for theatre and TV, productions including Juliet Jenkin's The Boy Who Fell From the Roof' for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Fleur du Cap and won Best Female Performance Award at the 2007 Dublin Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival. Directing credits include Venom, Deep Freezing – for which she was nominated for a Best New Director Fleur du Cap award in 2009 - and Umsintsi. Most recently she performed in Juliet Jenkin’s The Night Doctor for the Artscape 2010 Spring Season, The Taming of The Shrew at Maynardville and Perfect Wedding for Pieter Toerien Productions. She has an ongoing association with the Mothertongue Project, an all female community-conscious performance collective, Magnet Theatre and Well Worn, an environmental theatre company.

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DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY •Tracey-Lea Potgieter is an eco stylist and set dresser | designer who can style a photoshoot, create a set from scratch and is generally hands-on and willing. She has a vast working background ranging from product launches, photoshoot styling TV & Film production. She now turn her talents towards set dressing & design, art direction, interior design and photoshoot styling. She is also an acclaimed graphic designer.