Director – Junna Chif – 2025 – Canada – 94m
****1/2
A sex worker turned exotic dancer starts providing sexual services to disabled people – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
“Blow jobs are real jobs – and real jobs suck” reads a slogan held by three boisterous young women on a protest march. In a nightclub, we watch one of them perform a burlesque striptease to rapturous applause from the audience, seated in male and female blocks. ‘Ella’ (Nadia Essadiqi from Incendies, Denis Villeneueve, 2010) later gets an email from the disabled brother of a friend stating he is now “ready for full sexual intercourse”.
She decides to meet the challenge, so the sender turns up in a van with his carer Marco (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) who hoists him onto the bed, then departs for an hour leaving a contact number. Floyd (Floyd Lapierre-Poupart) can’t move much and has club hands and feet, and their initial encounter proves less than successful, resulting in his premature ejaculation. You sense that the whole exercise is way outside both their comfort zones. In the tense exchange that follows with Marco, he emphasises that the correct term is “people with a disability, Miss” and she retorts with, “sex workers, Sir.”… Read the rest
