Wishlist

A call to arms collaboration between filmmaker Kristina McCormick and performer Ruin Klarity captures a rare glimpse into unspoken interior dialogues of sex workers

wish list - noun : a list of desired but often realistically unobtainable items

How does sex work affect sex workers? Wishlist ponders the perpetual catch twenty-two sex workers face both in their internal world and external lifes. A spoken word portrait, a rhetorical work that unlocks questions with the viewer placed as voyeur. Told through a collage of textures, symbols and body movement, in Wishlist, filmmaker and writer Kristina McCormick collaborates with writer and performer Ruin Klarity to chronicle a momentary snapshot of a sex worker's interior experience(s). 

The impetus for Wishlist stems from Ruin Klarity’s unreserved reflections shortly after partaking as a consultant at the Charite Hospital Berlin, Germany. Here, they provided research for a case study on improving mental health services for sex workers. Ruin Klarity poses the question, “what if only your community understands you… what if you don’t have a community at all?”. Sex work and sex work activism: a hand in glove forged connectivity, an inseparable pairing? A labor force existing in societies underbellies, Ruin Klarity contemplates internal isolation versus a forever fight for organisation within a community surrounded by complexity. Vocalising the psychic isolation(s) within physical exchange and movement as trade, Wishlist raises concerns over the protections and rights for sex workers: does surface level liberal lip service happily turn a blind eye to truth? In Wishlist, the viewer is given the riddle of pain and ecstasy, each frame pulsating with glistening grain, colliding with secrets and iconography.

Using personal anecdote and deep seated experience to flash at muted, underlying truisms of the ethical underpinnings of sex work; a good day and bad day, how to play it? Here lies a continuing riddle for the sex worker. When exchange of pleasure is a criminal act, the shadow of its poetry is left to whispers, exiled to unknown territories.

Cuts of abstract tonal shifts, decadent flourishes and dionysiac movement(s); Wishlist revels in its candy pink metaphors heightened in texture. Filmic representation of broken system(s) and beauty beneath the decay. Ruin Klarity ponders, “not only do we lie to you, we also lie to ourselves” - a finely tuned contradiction of errors based on the daily for sex workers, struggling to find inner and outer voices with (in) a system on self destruct mode.

“THE HUSTLE IS THE POETRY OF CAPITALISM.”

Co Writer / Director - Krisitna McCormick

Co writer / Performance - Ruin Klarity

Music - So Klarity (Marie Malarie Remix)