'We want to create a space for sex workers' stories, and in doing so hope to challenge stigma and shame.'
Red Umbrella Film Festival is Ireland's first-ever sex worker film festival. RUFF is organised by a collective of current and former sex workers and will feature films, workshops, panel discussions, and performances.
Below, the team behind RUFF introduce this year's event, which takes place at various venues across Dublin this October.
In June this year, Human Rights Watch observed how the decriminalisation of sex work could be 'Ireland’s next opportunity to choose equality, safety, and rights’. Decriminalisation, or ‘decrim’ implies understanding sex work as work rather than as a criminal offence, and would lead to better and safer working conditions for sex workers.
In September, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee announced that ‘a tender will go out this week for a lead researcher to complete a review of current prostitution laws, which are governed by Part 4 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017’.
Most of our lives as sex workers exist in political spaces, negotiated by money, NGOs, and the law. We advertise online with our faces blurred for fear of harassment or arrest, take handouts from religious and grassroots organisations, cash in on a good client in a city centre hotel or strip club.
Out in public, we are controversial topics: subjects of debate, journalism, and charity work. In our private lives, we are as heterogeneous as any demographic – we watch tv in the evenings, prepare lunch boxes for our children, paint our toenails, visit a friend in prison. We wear Louboutins and Penneys pyjamas. We go to Lidl and Dunnes. We’re in direct provision and D4.
We also go to the cinema sometimes.
We want sex workers' voices to be heard: in the media, in research, on the streets, and on the screen.
Red Umbrella Film Festival was born out of a desire to create conversation and community around the issues sex workers face in Ireland and internationally, through film. We want to create a space for sex workers’ stories, and in doing so hope to challenge stigma and shame. We want sex workers’ voices to be heard: in the media, in research, on the streets, and on the screen. We’re organising this as a collective of current and former sex workers, but are hoping to reach a wide and diverse audience.
RUFF launches on Thursday 19th October at Dublin's Light House cinema, where Swedish writer and director Tove Pils will present the Irish premiere of their documentary Labor (2023). Other highlights include the European premiere of Fly In Power (2023), a documentary exploring the work of Red Canary Song, a grassroots organisation of Asian and migrant sex and massage workers, and All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (2022) which follows the life of artist and former sex worker Nan Goldin. Our short film programme will include House Of Whoreship (2023), a queer love story set in a suburban brothel by director Holly Bates, and Call Me Mommy (2022), an intimate portrait of Irish sex worker and mother of four Sinéad, followed by a Q&A.
The four-day festival will take place in the Light House, Unite the Union on Abbey Street, Wigwam, and the Grand Social, and will feature harm reduction and legal advice workshops, panels with filmmakers, and a Saturday night event with burlesque, comedy, and pole dance performances.
Come say hello – you might even win at stripper bingo!
The Red Umbrella Film Festival takes place at various venues across Dublin from 19th - 22nd October - find out more here.
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