Alya Kara
2023
France
French
Documentary | Queer ♡
45 minutes
A closed encounter with a stigmatized community, constantly pushed to the margins: independent sex workers. This invisibilised community, forced to live hidden because they are not wanted in this society. For them, getting together is more than necessary, it is a matter of survival.
Cybèle
Lesperance
Beverly Ruby
Sun
Ferdine
Louve
Director of photography | Paul Sudron
Sound Engineer | Jean-Luc Etienne
Editor | Théo Chasson
Mixing | Jules Meyerie
Music Composer | Ohleogan
SNAP! Brussels Porn Film Festival
Alya Kara is a multidisciplinary artist and activist born in the Pas-de-Calais and now living in Seine-Saint-Denis in France.
After an audiovisual training, she studied production at the CinéFabrique film school in Lyon, France.
With her twin sister, Alya is working on a theatrical performance, an autobiographical video show: Okhty ("my sister", in Arabic).
They work mainly on questions of identity (cultural, gender, class, etc.) to try to weave the necessary links between them to understand oneself.
Sensitive and rebellious, fascinated by human encounters, it is by exploring several artistic mediums as a place of expression and creation that she made her way to the directing of her first documentary film: Longue Vie aux Putes (Hurrah the whores).
Through this film Alya chooses to give voice to a community that is rarely heard, to ones that we refuse to listen.
"We talk about them on the one hand as passive victims to be saved or at the other hand as capitalist whores who play the game of the patriarchy" – OCEAN in the podcast La politique des putes
While many seem hell-bent on making them disappear, they fight to exist. We could not imagine this situation for any other work. Because that's what they do: work. The laws against sex workers are more and more restrictive. They say they are fighting against procuring but they attack sex workers.
Excluded from certain feminist fights, often unable to tell their relatives their work, isolation can quickly take hold. The stigma is omnipresent and has direct consequences on their lives.
Getting together becomes a matter of survival. Gathering together to learn, to get information, to protect themselves. Gathering to support, to reassure, to comfort, to give each other the strength to keep going in the midst of all this violence. To gather to militate for their rights, to organize themselves against the laws anti-them.
In this film, a group of friends entrust us about their family, their financial situation, their identity and their work. Alya Kara mad us meet Cybele, Lesperance, Beverly Ruby, Sun, Ferdine and Louve. Through her film, we become their friends. And we support our friends.
