Evento

KARAOKE GIRL

Dir. Visra Vichit-Vadakan, 2013
Thailand/USA, 77 min.
In Thai with English subtitles

KARAOKE GIRL follows a young sex worker in Bangkok through portraits of her daily life, introducing us to the nuances of a vocation borne out of a simple necessity: supporting a family in rural Thailand. The film threads memoirs of her countryside childhood with the complicated reality of her urban life. Cast as herself, 23-year-old Sa is revealed to us through both documentary and fiction as she navigates both the city and the country, family and romance. Through the lens of one womans real-life experience, KARAOKE GIRL humanizes and complicates the depiction of a social class which is usually painted as flat caricature. Rather than presenting a traditional narrative, KARAOKE GIRL offers a personal landscape of a woman who is thoughtful and optimistic despite her difficult past. This film is Sas anthemher way of sharing with me (and you) her fears, hopes, and dreams. Director Visra Vichit Vadakan

"The representation of female prostitution in the movies takes place in a complex, dynamic field in which the forces of male fantasy and patriarchal ideology...merge or collide...." - Russell Campbell, Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema

The films in this series attempt to eschew the usual trappings of sex work as portrayed in cinema (especially narrative cinema) by a adopting a neutral documentary-style approach, even as they all contain staged elements. Each film is, to varying extents, a hybrid of the two forms. The filmmakers adopt a non-judgmental (or sympathetic) view of sex workers even as they may define sex work itself as a symptom of larger forces of inequality within patriarchy, capitalism or communism. Each film is the result of active collaboration with their subjects (and, in some cases, their clients), and are predicated on an extraordinary level of access. While some of the films contain scenes of graphic sexuality, they are either neutral or aggressively anti-erotic, although the extent to which they may or may not be considered exploitative is a complex question which must ultimately be left to the viewer.