Confronting Discrimination

 

Conference Ι Registration Ι Filmscreening

 JOY | Sudabeh Mortezai | AUT 2018 | 101 min

Film screening at Leokino Innsbruck, Anichstraße 36, 6020 Innsbruck 

Opening: Precious Mariam Sanusi 

On October 29 at 6 pm we will show the film "Joy" by Sudabeh Mortezai at the Leokino Innsbruck. We are pleased to announce that actress Precious Mariam Sanusi will be present during the screening and will open the film with a statement. Precious Mariam Sanusi is an actress and writer, known for Wine maker (2011), Joy (2018), SCARed (2018) and Fox in a Hole (2020). She was born in Lagos, Nigeria and relocated to Austria at the age of fourteen. She has been residing in Austria for seven years with her family. 

Watch the official trailer: 

“Once we realize Joy is merely a name and the freedom the eponymous prostitute works for is nothing more than spectres of a life which she will never be able to live, it is already too late. Rarely has the popular Austrian practice of filming prostitution in Vienna felt so exigent and desperate as in Sudabeh Mortezai’s second feature. As the camera observes the daily life of illegal immigrant Joy, a sex worker from Nigeria being caught in the trafficking of women, it gets harder and harder to judge ethical decisions and differ between good and evil. Instead of moral lessons and dramaturgical chains JOY is interested in the life caused by one of the many perversions of capitalism. Everybody is a victim, everybody is a perpetrator. Filmed in an elliptical but caring disorientation reminiscent of direct cinema one feels that not only dark voodoo powers have taken possession of these women but a relentless system. Mortezai repeatedly focusses on the face of Joy as if to look for the possible hope and escape cinema usually finds. However, she only clings to the human grace speaking behind those struggling eyes. Joy fights for a survival that seems to be just a prolonged death.“ (Patrick Holzapfel)