Movies About Sex Workers
Title | Year | Director | Starring | Synopsis |
---|---|---|---|---|
Lakshmi | 2014 | Nagesh Kukunoor | Monali Thakur, Vibha Chhibber, Ranjeet Jha | Lakshmi is a 2014 Indian Hindi-language biographical social problem film, written and directed by Nagesh Kukunoor. |
She's Lost Control | 2014 | Anja Marquardt | Brooke Bloom, Marc Menchaca, Denis Boutsikaris | The professional and personal life of a sexual surrogate begins to unravel when she starts working with a new client. |
Afternoon Delight | 2013 | Jill Soloway | Kathryn Hahn, Josh Radnor, Juno Temple | Rachel is a quick-witted and lovable stay-at-home mom. Frustrated with the realities of preschool auctions, a lackluster sex life and career that's gone kaput, Rachel visits a strip club to spice up her marriage and meets McKenna, a stripper she adopts as her live-in nanny. |
Young and Beautiful | 2013 | François Ozon | Marine Vacth, Geraldine Pailhas, Frederic Pierrot | After losing her virginity, Isabelle takes up a secret life as a call girl, meeting her clients for hotel-room trysts. Throughout, she remains curiously aloof, showing little interest in the encounters themselves or the money she makes. |
The Sessions | 2012 | Ben Lewin | John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy | A man in an iron lung who wishes to lose his virginity contacts a professional sex surrogate with the help of his therapist and priest. |
Meet The Fokkens | 2011 | Gabrielle Provaas, Rob Schröder | Louise Fokkens, Martine Fokkens | A documentary on Louise and Martine Fokkens, 69-year-old twin sisters who have worked as prostitutes in the red-light district in Amsterdam for over 40 years. |
House of Tolerance | 2011 | Bertrand Bonello | Noémie Lvovsky, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette | At an elegant Parisian bordello at the dawn of the 20th century, exists a cloistered world of pleasure, pain, hope, rivalries, and most of all, slavery. |
Whore's Glory | 2011 | Michael Glawogger | Emma, Ning, Toh | Whores' Glory is a movie starring Emma, Ning, and Toh. An examination of the lives, needs, troubles and hopes of prostitutes in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico. |
Student Services | 2010 | Emmanuelle Bercot | Déborah François, Alain Cauchi, Mathieu Demy | A financially strapped college student (Déborah François) enters the sex trade to make ends meet. |
The Client List | 2010 | Eric Laneuville | Jennifer Love Hewitt, Teddy Sears, Sonja Bennett | A woman (Jennifer Love Hewitt) unknowingly takes a job at a massage parlor where prostitution runs rampant. |
Happy Endings | 2009 | Tara Hurley | David Cicilline, Steven Brown, Joanne Giannini | Filmed over 27 months, it chronicles the lives of the women in massage parlors in Rhode Island during a battle in the state legislature to once again make prostitution illegal. |
A Call Girl | 2009 | Damjan Kozole | Nina Ivanisin, Peter Musevski, Primoz Pirnat | Alexandra is a student from Krsko, a small town in Slovenia, while she studies the English language in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. She has a plan to conquer the world. Working as a prostitute, her life is heading to where she wants it, but an accidental death has her wrestling with new feelings of fear, loneliness, confusion and responsibility. |
Princesas | 2005 | Fernando León de Aranoa | Candela Peña, Micaela Nevárez, Mariana Cordero | Friendship and love in the world of prostitution in Madrid. |
Or (My Treasure) | 2004 | Keren Yedaya | Dana Ivgy, Ronit Elkabetz, Meshar Cohen | A 17-year-old (Dana Ivgy) in Tel Aviv, Israel, takes after her mother (Ronit Elkabetz) and becomes a prostitute. |
Julie | 2004 | Deepak S. Shivdasani | Neha Dhupia, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Yash Tonk | A heart broken Julie comes to Mumbai to make a living, but the fast moving city will force her to take prostitution as her profession. |
Chameli | 2003 | Sudhir Mishra | Kareena Kapoor, Rahul Bose, Rinke Khanna | On a rainy night, when an investment banker's car breaks down in the red light district, he takes shelter where he meets and later befriends a prostitute. |
The Sea is Watching | 2002 | Kei Kumai | Misa Shimizu, Nagiko Tôno, Masatoshi Nagase | An orphaned geisha falls for two samurai in Japan. |
Golden Chicken | 2002 | Samson Chiu | Sandra Kwan Yue Ng, Eric Tsang, Eason Chan | A thief starts to fall for his would-be victim, a charming prostitute, who shares her life story. |
All About My Mother | 1999 | Pedro Aldomovar | Cecilia Roth, Marissa Paredes, Penelope Cruz | After a single mother loses her teenage son in a traffic accident, she moves from Madrid to Barcelona, where she becomes intimately involved in the lives of sex workers, actors and the infirm. |
Leaving Las Vegas | 1995 | Mike Figgis | Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue, Julian Sands | Ben Sanderson, a Hollywood screenwriter who lost everything because of his alcoholism, arrives in Las Vegas to drink himself to death. There, he meets and forms an uneasy friendship and non-interference pact with prostitute Sera. |
Mighty Aphrodite | 1995 | Woody Allen | Woody Allen, Mira Sorvino, Pamela Blair | When he discovers his adopted son is a genius, a New York sportswriter seeks out the boy's birth mother: a ditzy porn star and prostitute. |
Pretty Woman | 1990 | Gary Marshall | Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Jason Alexander | A man in a legal but hurtful business needs an escort for some social events, and hires a beautiful prostitute he meets... only to fall in love. |
Last Exit to Brooklyn | 1989 | Uli Edel | Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Lang, Burt Young | Set in Brooklyn during the 1950s against a backdrop of union corruption and violence. A prostitute falls in love with one of her customers. Also a disturbed man discovers that he is homosexual |
Working Girls | 1986 | Lizzie Borden | Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin | Working Girls is a 1986 independent film, written, produced and directed by Lizzie Borden. It depicts a day in the life of upper class prostitutes in a small Manhattan bordello, and was considered by some a feminist portrayal. |
Lola | 1981 | Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mario Adorf | In post-war West Germany, the charming Von Bohm is appointed a city's new Building Commissioner. His morality is tested when he unknowingly falls in love with a brothel worker, Lola, the paid mistress of a corrupt property developer. |
Pretty Baby | 1978 | Louis Malle | Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine, Susan Sarandon | A teenage girl lives as a prostitute in New Orleans in 1917. |
Sandakan No. 8 | 1974 | Kei Kumai | Komaki Kurihara, Yôko Takahashi, Kinuyo Tanaka | A journalist interviews an old woman who was forced into prostitution, just like many other Japanese women working in Asia outside of Japan during the first half of the 20th century. She worked in a Malaysian brothel called Sandakan 8. |
Belle du Jour | 1967 | Luis Bunuel | Catherine Denueve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli | A frigid young housewife decides to spend her midweek afternoons as a prostitute. |
The Red Lanterns | 1963 | Vasilis Georgiadis | Jenny Karezi, Giorgos Foundas, Dimitris Papamichael | The inextricably intertwined stories of five women who work as prostitutes just before the ban on brothels in Troumba. |
Mamma Roma | 1962 | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti | Mamma Roma is a 1962 Italian drama film written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Anna Magnani and Ettore Garofolo. |
Never On Sunday | 1960 | Jules Dassin | Melina Mercouri, Jules Dassin, Giorgos Foundas | An American scholar in Greece sets about improving the prostitute with whom he is infatuated. |
Hungry for Love | 1960 | Antonio Pietrangeli | Simone Signoret, Marcello Mastroianni, Sandra Milo | When new laws force their brothel to close, four former prostitutes open a restaurant. |
Street of Shame | 1956 | Kenji Mizoguchi | Machiko Kyô, Aiko Mimasu, Ayako Wakao | The personal tales of various prostitutes who occupy a Japanese brothel. |
The Life of Oharu | 1952 | Kenji Mizoguchi | Kinuyo Tanaka, Tsukie Matsuura, Ichirô Sugai | Follows a woman's fight and survival amid the vicissitudes of life and the cruelty of the society. |
Dédée d'Anvers | 1948 | Yves Allégret | Bernard Blier, Simone Signoret, Marcello Pagliero | Dedee works as a prostitute in a night club and dreams of escaping from her dull life when she meets a handsome sailor. |

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