Rooms of Shadow and Light

A Very British Brothel

August 2015 •English

A look at the daily life of an English brothel.

Guaicurus Street

July 2022 •Portuguese

A red-light district in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The camera is admitted into a "running house". Love for sale looks like a routine, dreary assembly line exercise here, sometimes almost like a comedy.

Agent of Happiness

July 2024 •Dzongkha

The documentary team follows two happiness agents in their forties who spend a month and a half on the road twice a year, going door-to-door with their questionnaires in isolated villages in the Himalayas. The filmmakers undertake to provide an intimate insight into the daily lives and desires of Bhutanese people, and also seek the answer to the universal question of whether happiness can really be measured. Gross National Happiness promises a heart-warming journey into a mysterious, fairytale-like world, which is the exact opposite of the social order dominated by consumption and desires.

Lost Songs of Sundari

April 2025 •Marathi

In Mumbai, once an island city linked by the sea, modern bridges and land reclamation have reshaped the landscape, disrupting the lives of its original communities.

Baraf

July 2018 •English

Ice (Baraf) is essential to almost every step of the fishing supply chain at Sassoon Docks, Mumbai's largest fish market, and this short documentary takes you through a day in the life of the workers responsible for it.

The Pink Room

February 2011 •English

After selling herself at fourteen to a brothel inside her home town of Svay Pak, Mien takes an undesired path all over Cambodia for the remainder of her teenage life. At twenty, her path crosses with a group of people fighting to make a difference, bringing her long and onerous journey back to face where it all began. The Pink Room is an intertwined story of the heart-rending, epic battle to end sex slavery, from rescue to prevention, and experiencing first hand, the need to change not just individuals, but the communities they come from. Most documentaries on trafficking only bring awareness to the problem. This film bring awareness to the solutions.

Filles de joie et de misère

March 2017 •French

Love Meetings

July 1965 •Italian

Pier Paolo Pasolini sets out to interview Italians about sex, apparently their least favorite thing to talk about in public: he asks children if they know where babies come from; asks old and young women if they support gender equality; asks both sexes if a woman's virginity still matters, what do they think of homosexuality, if divorce should be legal, or if they support the recent abolition of brothels. He interviews blue-collar workers, intellectuals, college students, rural farmers, the bourgeoisie, and every other kind of people, painting a vivid portrait of a rapidly-industrializing Italy, hanging between modernity and tradition — toward both of which Pasolini shows equal distrust.

Chicken Ranch

May 1983 •English

Documentary on the "Chicken Ranch," a legal Nevada brothel.

Paris Brothel

August 2003 •English

From the early 19th century 1946 Paris had many brothels that were tolerated and controlled by the state. These were sometimes rough places but more often were housed in richly designed buildings and serviced a clientèle from all walks of life. This documentary looks back at the Paris brothels through photographs, historians as well as memories from some who would frequent them as clients or work there as prostitutes.

Mustang: The House That Joe Built

July 1977 •English

A documentary about the girls of the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.

A Month With the Girls

March 2024 •French

The French female pioneer of immersion journalism, Maryse Choisy, who infiltrated in 1928 the prostitution underworld of Paris. Posing as a chambermaid, a lesbian bar dancer and more, she wrote a very successful and scandalous book about that avant-garde experience, and changed her mind about this world and these women's difficult condition.

India Cabaret

January 1985 •Hindi

A documentary exploring the "respectable" and "immoral" stereotypes of women in Indian society told from the point of view of 2 strip-tease dancers in a cabaret house in Bombay.

Surviving Mumbai

November 2009 •English

Survivors of the Mumbai terrorist attacks tell the inside story of the actions and decisions that helped save their lives.

Our Greatest Ambassador

January 1922 •English

Richly detailed record of the Prince of Wales' Indian tour.

Edward Prince of Wales' Tour of India: Bombay, Poona, Baroda, Jodhpur and Bikaner

January 1922 •English

The future Edward VIII visits his Empire, with Indian royalty, elephants, palaces and temples.

Aufstand im Bordell - Frauenhandel um 1900

March 2024 •German

In the spring of 1902, Viennese working-class daughter Marie König runs away from her beating father and is lured into a high-class brothel by an agent. Instead of the promised self-determined life "with horse-drawn carriage rides and silk dresses", she experiences closed doors, violence and exploitation. Only after years of agony does Marie confide in the journalist Emil Bader, who makes the conditions in the brothel public and takes the owner, Regine Riehl, to court.

The Typewriter and Other Headaches

April 2024 •French

This third opus will take us into the homes of some of the ADAMANT and AVERROES & ROSA PARKS’ protagonists, during the visits led by their caregivers.

Louis Theroux: Louis and the Brothel

November 2003 •English

Louis stays with the residents of a soon to open brothel in Nevada for a few weeks.

DPJ

December 2017 •French

A direct, uncompromising look into the complex machinery of Quebec’s youth protection services (known as the DPJ). https://lustitia.com/en/productions/dpj/