The first ever Hong Kong Sex Workers’ Film Festival is scheduled to open Friday with films focusing on prostitution in Asia, Pravda reported.
The festival, hosted by the sex worker support group Zi Teng, seeks to provide more realistic portrayals of prostitutes woking in Asia, its organizers say.
The program is made up of nine films, which includes contributions from Canada, the U.S., Taiwan, India and Hong Kong. But the films are not necessarily about the sex workers themselves, who sometimes wrote and produced them.
A woman who goes by the name of Yau, who teaches cultural studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said she hopes the films break cultural stereotypes about prostitutes.
The festival features The Story of the Taipei Prostitutes, which details the campaign to fight a ban on prostitution in the Taiwanese capital. Another short film focuses on the “Sex Worker’s Manifesto,” created at the first National Conference of Sex Workers in Calcutta, India, in 1997.
Both films revolve around prostitution activist Carol Leigh, who is said to have coined the term “sex worker” and established the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival.
