The Film Collaborative Boards Sex Work Documentary ‘Labor’ as Film Screens at CPH:DOX (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Lise Pedersen Los Angeles non-profit The Film Collaborative has boarded Swedish director Tove Pils’ debut feature “Labor,” which is competing in the Nordic:Dox section at the Copenhagen Intl.

Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX. The film follows Hanna, who leaves her family and girlfriend behind in her small Swedish hometown and travels to San Francisco to explore her sexuality in the city’s vibrant queer scene.

She soon meets Chloe, a professional dominatrix, and Cyd, a trans man who works as an escort for gay men. Together with her new friends, she embarks on a journey that takes her further and further away from her life in Sweden. “Labor” was shot over more than a decade, and one of the reasons it took them so long to put the film together was their concern for the protagonists’ anonymity and the effect it might have on their lives, Pils explains to Variety. “The way people reacted to me even using the word sex work here in Sweden made me doubt why I was making the film, and if anyone would even be able to listen to what my friends in the film had to say or take in this world that I wanted to portray,” she says.

They were keen to offer a better understanding of their protagonists’ choices, and for them not to be perceived as victims, but as workers with agency over their own lives. “It felt very violent when people, for example, would say that all sex workers are being raped.