Film critic and author Marya E. Gates will be joining us to host a special screening of Lizzie Borden's unsung feminist landmark, WORKING GIRLS.
Trailblazing director Lizzie Borden is one of 19 filmmakers profiled in Marya E. Gates's newly published first book, Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words. WORKING GIRLS is Borden’s radically nonjudgmental, immersive, and 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 classic 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.
Marya E. Gates will be signing copies of her new book, which will also be for sale at this event.