Modern Whore

Modern Whore is a hybrid film based on a memoir of the same name by Andrea Werhun. It blends documentary with fiction, featuring reenactments, testimonials, animations, and archival footage in a fast-paced and spirited reimagining of Werhun’s life as a sex worker. She teamed up with director Nicole Bazuin for the documentary, where she explores agency, labour, intimacy, and identity, telling stories about the behaviours of clients, the owners of her escort agency, and the unique growing pains of learning on the job.

The documentary is subversive. It takes the typically bleak genre of sex work films, grabs the microphone, and displays the real life of a sex worker straight from the horse’s mouth. The film includes conversations between Werhun and fellow sex workers, who discuss their experiences of sex work through the lens of race, gender diversity, and neurodivergence – though only ever in short cameos. It also includes conversations between Werhun and her mother, and with her long-term partner – both of whom are incredibly supporting of her.

It’s upbeat, it’s colourful. It deals with the darker side of sex work without making it the whole side. While it empowers and gives agency to sex workers who often don’t get to tell their own stories, I couldn’t help but feel some moments are self-indulgent. It makes sweeping statements about sex work based on Werhun’s very specific experience, while at the same time barely reaching below the surface. The over-dramatisation is often jarring and slapstick, and while it covers a lot of themes, it sometimes reads like the diary of a teenager. Then again, without her unreserved confidence, a film with total agency like this one would never get made.

All that being said, I appreciate that Modern Whore is radical and important. Sex workers are often betrayed only as victim or villain, and here is a film featuring a three-dimensional and uncategorisable woman who is both empowered and embodied. In Canada sex work is not legal, making it a critical film about labour rights. Here in Aotearoa, it will challenge the biases of some of its more prudish and discriminatory audiences. Ultimately, I was engaged throughout and I would encourage people to head along and check it out. It will be screening as part of the Doc Edge Film Festival at the Roxy Cinema on Saturday the 25^th of July.