Faire le Bois

Reclaiming what was once stolen from him, a man journeys back to the place of his childhood nearly 80 years after his world came crashing down.

Ne è passata di acqua sotto i ponti. La Sarca raccontata dai suoi ponti

Filmmakers Holly Dale and Janis Cole explore the culture of Davie Street, located in the underbelly of Vancouver, where dozens of prostitutes work and live every day. Surprisingly, they find that the sex trade there is stable and largely non-violent, and that the women who work on Davie Street meet daily to discuss safety and health issues and don't use pimps. The film also includes candid interviews with the prostitutes and footage of negotiations with potential clients.

Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute is a 1975 Japanese film by director Shohei Imamura. It is a documentary on one of the Japanese "karayuki-san," who were women that were taken from their homes in Japan and used as prostitutes in the post-war period. Many of these women were told that they were doing this to support their families because of the extreme poverty that the war left much of Japan to live in. Imamura focuses on a particular such woman who was sent to Malaysia and never returned to Japan. Joan Mellen, in The Waves at Genji's Door, called this film, "Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries."

The British invented them for the world, and they have been described as 'the lungs of the city - historian Dan Cruickshank reveals the history of our public parks.

Voices from the Silence

This short documentary profiles the idyllic landscapes of Parc Lafontaine. Set to an original song, the film follows a mother who brings her son to the park, where he plays, swings, and watches the ducks and gondolas glide on the pond. As an adult, he wanders through the park with his sweetheart. The song closes sadly, for his sweetheart leaves him. The passing gondola seems to bear his love away forever, but the final scenes suggest a happy ending. - NFB

In the spring of 1902, Viennese working-class daughter Marie König runs away from her beating father and is lured into a high-class brothel by an agent. Instead of the promised self-determined life "with horse-drawn carriage rides and silk dresses", she experiences closed doors, violence and exploitation. Only after years of agony does Marie confide in the journalist Emil Bader, who makes the conditions in the brothel public and takes the owner, Regine Riehl, to court.

Afro-American men and women express their views on why some Black men are travelling from the US to Brazil to find sex partners.

Un printemps de square

Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.

The French female pioneer of immersion journalism, Maryse Choisy, who infiltrated in 1928 the prostitution underworld of Paris. Posing as a chambermaid, a lesbian bar dancer and more, she wrote a very successful and scandalous book about that avant-garde experience, and changed her mind about this world and these women's difficult condition.

Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.

Pigerne på Halmtorvet

In the late 1990s, some officers at Vancouver Police Department made a documentary film (THROUGH A BLUE LENS) about the everyday lives of six drug addicts in Vancouver's skid row, the Downtown Eastside. TEARS FOR APRIL reintroduces us to these six people; with footage shot over a period of nearly ten years, it continues their biography.

"Buying Her" takes a deep dive into the stories of men who buy sex.

I was scrounging around the neighborhood for inspiration. Within a block from my apartment, I found a wild mushroom in the grass, and an advertisement for a psychic named Sara.

Sound progression of two opposite landscapes.

A behind-the-scenes inside a news story that swept the US: a Zumba instructor, Alexis Wright, who lead a double life as a prostitute. With never-before-seen interviews from men on “the List,” local media and even her husband, Sex, Lies and Zumba will delve deeper into the operation, those involved, and just how this scandal took place in the small town of Kennebunk, Maine.

Atrabilis