One of our top picks at Copenhagen Documentary film festival, CPH:DOX, was Tove Pils Labor – a story that followed their friend’s experience with sex work in San Francisco. We spoke to the director about their film that explores sexuality, sex work, and the journeys we go on to self-discovery.

Nordic Watchlist: Give us an introduction to your film Labor

Tove Pils: I started this project in 2010, so it’s been a long road. At that time I was just doing interviews with my friends in San Francisco. I knew I wanted to make a film, but it took a long time before the film started to take the form it has today.

In Labor, Hanna’s anonymous voice-over leads you through the film and is intertwined with the interviews with the two other main characters. You never see Hanna. It’s more like you are in her head or like she is reading from her diary to you. I want the audience to get to travel with her to San Francisco and meet the city and the people for the first time, just like she did. I want to give the feeling that you also see the two other main characters through her eyes. 

As the film starts Hanna leaves her family and girlfriend behind to go to the city of her dreams, San Francisco, where she hopes to explore her sexuality, beyond what is possible in her small hometown. Soon she meets the professional dominatrix Chloe and the escort Cyd. A door into a new world opens up for Hanna, and together with Chloe and Cyd, she begins a journey which takes her further and further away from her life and family in Sweden. Through Hanna’s and the two other main characters’ journeys, Labor portrays different reasons to enter into sex work, how sex work intersects with larger societal issues and the profound effect that stigma and external moral judgment can have on the lives of sex workers.

As a queer filmmaker, I wanted to focus on the experiences of queers in the sex industry, specifically in San Francisco, a city with a long history of activism, resistance and sexual liberation. The experiences depicted in the film are of course specific for these three individuals, their class backgrounds, privilege and other factors that affect working conditions for sex workers.

As a queer filmmaker, I wanted to focus on the experiences of queers in the sex industry, specifically in San Francisco, a city with a long history of activism, resistance and sexual liberation.

They are, for example, all white and have by now all studied at the university. I believe it is essential that we set out to capture what affects the lives and the working conditions for sex workers with different backgrounds and privileges. What I really set out to focus on in Labor was to show the uniqueness of the queer sex worker community that the three main characters are a part of; the openness, support, and understanding which exist within it.

And how being a part of this community can affect the experience of sex work. In the film interviews and diary notes (that’ve I collected over the course of these 10 years) there is an insight provided into how the main characters’ relationships to sex work changes through time. We see how they navigate their own moral compasses and come to terms with their choices and identities. 

I have to add though, that to me, Labor is definitely not only a film about sex work. It’s also a film about longing to explore your sexuality and to have relationships beyond monogamy and trying to find a community or a place where you can do that. It’s about what you do to reach your dreams or goals, and how of course it can be intertwined with your choice of work.

I have to add though, that to me, Labor is definitely not only a film about sex work. It’s also a film about longing to explore your sexuality and to have relationships beyond monogamy and trying to find a community or a place where you can do that.

Nordic Watchlist: The film has taken some time to come to fruition – what were some of the challenges you faced with bringing it to life?

Tove Pils: I think the biggest challenge was definitely dealing with how being a part of the project can affect the lives of the people who are in the film and visible. I think simultaneously with this I was also questioning making a film about sex work at all; that people wouldn’t be able to receive it anyway. I felt like maybe it will just create more conflict and polarity, and what I wanted was to create a less agitated conversation where there is room for different experiences and where they are not used against each other.

I think the biggest challenge was definitely dealing with how being a part of the project can affect the lives of the people who are in the film and visible.

So for a while I had the feeling that maybe a movie about sexuality and what it can be would make a bigger difference for sex workers, because it could have the ability to change people’s morals around sexuality. And then maybe, instead of mixing up morals around sexuality with opinions on sex work, people could see more clearly what makes a situation violent or exploitative for sex workers and what we need to do to make it safer.

So that, but mainly the risks involved for the people who are in the film, actually made me stop working on the project for a couple of years. During the process of making the film we have talked a lot about what it would mean to come out as a sex worker in Sweden in a movie like this and after years of back and forth decided it just wouldn’t be worth it. If you come out in a film, in a small place like this, with so few sex workers visible and open, I think it becomes so much more than being in a movie. 

Nordic Watchlist: When did you have the ‘light bulb’ moment of how you could progress with the film without revealing your subject?

Tove Pils: I got into the masters program in film at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and started working with the project again. My teacher there Cecilia Torquato De Oliveira I think saw how much I was struggling and how hard it was hard for me to move on with the project.

She said that if I felt that worried about it, I needed to find a way to make Hanna anonymous or not have her in the film at all. I spent a lot of those two years trying to find a form for Hanna’s anonymity, and was even debating making all the characters anonymous and did tests with other people reenacting the interviews.

Pretty early on I tried using the voice-over, since I had collected a lot of written material. I think showing tests, edited footage of voice-over weaved together with interviews and realizing that in some ways it added a layer to the film. Hanna could be more personal, she could speak more directly to the audience and they could be inside her thoughts. It also was nice with the tempo change from the interviews, which have a really high tempo.

Hanna’s voice could be slower and give more time to take her words in. But maybe the most important thing I realized was that this form was a great way to bring up the question of anonymity, the fear of coming out that many sex workers have. That it was great to have this theme also infiltrate the form in this way and grow and be part of the film in a physical sense too.

I mean, Hanna is more privileged than most sex workers and still she has a lot to lose by coming out. Imagine coming out if you have kids, and you risk losing custody, or coming out if you risk being deported.

Nordic Watchlist: At what point did you realize you wanted to make this film? Was the footage you started off with just experimental or was there always an intent behind it to do something with it?

Tove Pils: Already when I went to visit San Francisco for the first time I think I knew or at least hoped that I would be able to make a project there. I went there as many other queers to get to be a part of or experience the queer scene there. I would say that for queers who have the privilege of being able to travel San Francisco and maybe Berlin is or was some kind of queer capitals.

From the people I had met from there I knew that many queers in San Francisco had experience of sex work or had partners or friends that had experience of it, so I knew sex work was very present in the queer communities there.

Pretty early on after I got there the first time, I had a feeling that I would like to show people outside that bubble what it can mean to have a community like that around you when you do sex work

I also had friends in Sweden and in Denmark who were sex workers and knew about the stigma they were facing here, which of course exists in San Francisco too, but inside of certain communities I would say it’s definitely less present.

I wasn’t completely sure I would make a film about sex work in the sense which Labor is now, when I went to San Francisco. It could also have been about BDSM or maybe porn. 

When I got there the first time I lived with a friend who was doing sex work and got to know many other sex workers and started to make interviews with them and I think, even with the footage I got then I felt like I knew I wanted to make something with it. But it wasn’t experimental at all. It was just interviews. My best friend Fanny who I was traveling with helped me buy a camera and we didn’t even have sound equipment first so it was very DIY.

I wasn’t completely sure I would make a film about sex work in the sense which Labor is now, when I went to San Francisco. It could also have been about BDSM or maybe porn. 

For a long time I also didn’t want a producer because of the risks for the people involved and I wanted to have the power myself to decide if the project should become a film or not. I also didn’t apply for any funding because one I didn’t want to feel any pressure to finish the film, and two because from my experience I would risk getting lost in just writing applications. So there was an intent but it was not very clear, and I kept the goal open for a long time. Once I started the masters program in film though, I think I became more oriented towards wanting the project to really become a film.

Nordic Watchlist: Where is Labor next getting screened?

Tove Pils: At Docs Against Gravity in Warsaw where it competes for Warsaw Documentary Award and “Newsweek Psychologia” Award for the best film on psychology

We have some other screenings coming up but are not allowed to disclose them yet.

Tove Pil’s Labor can next been seen at Frameline in San Francisco 19th of June 7:45 PM at the Roxie Theater As and when we hear of more screenings we will keep you posted.

Interview by Alex Minnis