Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the predicaments and opportunities posed by the online shooting of a collaborative film co-written with Chinese sex workers in Paris and originally scheduled to be filmed as a fiction, which has both enhanced and made more visible its collaborative approach as a result.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will discuss the ways in which the original methodological approach of the ERC-funded SEXHUM project (Sexual Humanitarianism: migration, sex work and trafficking; www.sexhum.org) was adapted to respond to the ethical and logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. SEXHUM adopts a creative methodological approach integrating ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviewing with collaborative ethnographic filmmaking (ethnofiction) through which groups of migrant sex workers express their lives and realities.

Plan B was produced in the context of SEXHUM through the collaboration between Nicola Mai and the Roses d’Acier sex worker rights association of Chinese cis women in Paris, France. The film was originally supposed to be shot as a fiction presenting the intersecting stories of two Chinese women, Jing and Duoduo, who decided to emigrate to France in order to help their children and families and also to realize their social mobility projects. Eventually, the film was shot mostly online during the COVID-19 pandemic in France and tells the stories of Lili and Duoduo through online discussions of the script by the members of Roses d’Acier who wrote it, as well as through original illustrations of its main scenes. The paper will discuss the predicaments and opportunities posed by this process of adaptation, which has both enhanced and made more visible its collaborative approach as a result.