Following the feminist insurgency of Born in Flames (1983), Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) tracks a single day inside a brothel in downtown Manhattan. Molly (Louise Smith) and her colleagues fix their clients’ drinks, trade tips on the johns’ kinks and log their earnings in a ledger managed by their overbearing boss, Lucy (Ellen McElduff). Shot in the pastel tones of a women’s magazine, this remarkable study of sex work blends ethnographic acuity with spiky wit to explore what it takes to do sexual labour. Borden empties her subject of stigma and eroticism to focus, in her words, “on the economics of prostitution… the condom, the exchange of money, putting the sheets on the bed”.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Lizzie Borden and is hosted by the academic Lili Owen Rowlands.