The RedRoom

The RedRoom is a reworking of a true event that happened to a friend of ours and it works perfectly as a short film. The framework of a hidden gag both drives the narrative forward, while allowing an interesting window to share a regularly misrepresented world. We get to use a glamorous cinematic grammar to drive sideways to a simple naked truth.

Sophie: As a storyteller, who is always mining in the shadows beneath the polite veneer we shroud our sexual lives with, it is only natural I return again to sex work. Many things are laid bare within the confines of a strip club, but ironically the most interesting thing laid bare is not women’s bodies.
I fearlessly dived into sex work at the age of eighteen, not because I did not have other options but because all the available alternatives felt tiresomely perdestrian at the time. Operating in the heart of what makes us human, I have used sex work from stripping, doming, to curating erotic experiences for couples as a kink concierge, which have financed and fed into my theatrical and cinematic art over the last 23 years.
By living my formative years in this parallel universe, I have absorbed a lens on the truth of being human for all its beauty and brutality. As a film maker I need to share this knowledge and understanding and challenge the worlds perspective of sex, sex work, relationships, and everything that connects us to our secret selves.
The RedRoom is a brief portal into the depths of a real strip club. The male entitlement, the normalisation of bleeding as just another work hazard to be fluffed off with cake and camaraderie. For women like us, this is a regular quiet day in the club.

Michael: As a director I spent too much of my career creating commercials that as well as selling beauty products also reinforced problematic ideas about gender, beauty, and sexuality. I am therefore delighted to engage with Sophie Cohen on The RedRoom. Sophie’s first instinct is as a ‘sex terrorist’ and this story gives us a small opportunity to expressing this instinct within an amusing fun tale. I suspect she would always have been a provocateur, but her previous work life allowed her access to examining the marginalised world of sex work (from the inside). This has given her a genuinely refreshing and unique perspective/take on what it is to be human. Her lens is formed in the shadows of our sexual culture, and it sees us all with an uncomfortable and comic brutality.
As a cis man who is constantly embarrassed and disappointed by the attitude of my gender towards female bodies, I love work that challenges some of our wrongs from a fun, easy-going, non-didactic position. We need more of Sophie’s co-workers to shout their truth as I feel this is the perfect antidote to men’s fragile, often offensive, and painfully predictable response to any real demonstration of feminine power that is ultimately, completely indifferent to them. The attentive indifference of women working in a strip club shouldn’t upset and confuse some men as much as it does and hopefully this film addresses this a little.