Working Girls
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“I Could Only Shoot When I Had Increments of $200 to Spend”: Lizzie Borden on Working Girls, Harvey Weinstein and Changing Perceptions of Sex Work
Highly respected but rarely screened, Working Girls, Lizzie Borden’s 1986 feature about a group of women working an extended shift in a Manhattan brothel, finally makes its way to home video this week thanks to the Criterion Collection. Presented in a new 4K digital restoration, the film is long overdue for reappraisal, and not merely due to the struggles currently faced by sex workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Borden’s previous feature, Born in Flames, was defiantly scrappy and overtly political. Working Girls represents an upgrade in production value while retaining Borden’s unwavering interest in feminist politics, race relations, workers’ rights […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 14, 2021 -
“Hype First”: Maxi Cohen on the Genesis of the IFP
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the IFP and its Film Week, filmmaker Maxi Cohen contributes the following guest essay on that moment of inception. — Editor Sandra Schulberg and I were in the train station after the 1978 Rotterdam Film Festival. I had presented Joe and Maxi, a film about my relationship with my father1, and Sandra had presented two movies produced for the PBS Visions series, The Gardener’s Son by Richard Pearce and Over-Under-Sideways-Down by the Cine Manifest collective. Marc Weiss had helped to arrange U.S. Indie Films in Rotterdam which they dubbed “Hollywood without Make-Up.” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2018
