Event

K (A FILM ABOUT PROSTITUTION)

Dir. György Dobray, 1989
Hungary, 85 min.
In Hungarian with English subtitles

This is the the most dangerous place in the country. I grew up here, and I cant break out. I get up and my first thought is Rákóczi Square. The Square is Budapests red light district, a place where anything can happen in the criminal code. Director Dobray spent months documenting the denizens of the square, including a group of cross-dressing sex workers, a woman whose face was slashed by a client, and the off-and-on (and, to some extent, staged) relationship between young sex worker Andrea and her boyfriend Tarzan, a pimp and lifelong resident of the Square. Made in 1989, the year Communism fell in Hungary, K (A FILM ABOUT PROSTITUTION) was banned for decades, and is rarely, if ever, screened in the US.

"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.