Join us for a NYWIFT Member Screening of the documentary Sex Work: It’s Just a Job by NYWIFT members Tami Kashia Gold and Bienvenida Matias.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and NY State Senator Jules Salazar (Chair, Committee on Crime Victims), Assemblymember Soufrant-Forrest (Assembly District 57), and Jared Trujillo (Law & Policy Counsel Equality New York), moderated by NYWIFT CEO Cynthia Lopez.
Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Quad Cinema (34 W. 13th Street, NY 10011)
Price: $7 for members, $15 for non-members
About the Film:
Sex Work: It’s Just a Job
Runtime: 56 minutes
Director: Tami Kashia Gold
Producers: Tami Kashia Gold, Bienvenida Matias, Alex Vitale
Editor: Chithra Jeyaram
Every day in cities across the country, hundreds of people are arrested for engaging in or offering consensual acts with adults. Their crime? Trading sex for the money. They are harassed, denied housing, incarcerated, and threatened by police officers.
Throughout the US there is a growing movement demanding that consensual sexual acts between adults be decriminalized, even when there is a monetary exchange. Sex workers argue that this is the only way to reduce the harm they experience.
Sex Work: It’s Just a Job tells the story of the movement to decriminalize sex work through an ensemble of people who work in the sex trades involving monetary exchange between adults. What sets this film apart is its centering of the voices of sex workers themselves: we hear from a diverse group of New York City workers and learn about their challenges, successes, and the solidarity they bring to their activism.
Sex Work: It’s Just a Job is for anyone who yearns for a deeper understanding of the meaning of sex work and the movements for sex workers’ rights.
About the Filmmakers:
Tami Kashia Gold (Producer, Director, Writer, Cameraperson) has been a multidisciplinary artist for over three decades. She produced Every Mother’s Son; Juggling Gender: Politics, Sex and Identity; Out At Work: Lesbian And Gay Men On The Job; Passionate Politics: The Life and Work Of Charlotte Bunch; RFK In The Land Of Apartheid; The Last Hunger Strike: Ireland 1981; among others. Tami’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival; Sundance; Tribeca Film Festival; Whitney; Museum of Modern Art; Chicago Institute of Art and on PBS/POV, HBO, America Reframed. She is a recipient of a Rockefeller; Guggenheim; Fulbright; NY/NJ Video Arts Fellowships; AFI Independent Filmmakers Fellowship; New York State Council for the Arts and awards from the Audience Award from Tribeca; Documentary Media Award from GLAAD; Excellence in the Arts Award from the Manhattan Borough President; Cine Golden Eagle Award; HUGO Award; Gold Plaque from the Chicago International Film Festival.
(L-R): Tami Kashia Gold (Producer/Director), Marla Cruz (featured in the film) Bienvenida Matias (Producer/ Co-Director)
Bienvenida Matías (Producer, Co-Director, Writer) is a pioneering New York-raised Puerto Rican filmmaker with a long career as a producer, director, writer of independent films and for public television. Her films have screened in the US, Mexico, and have been funded by the Latino Public Broadcasting, the Jerome Foundation, St. Paul Companies: Leadership Initiative in Neighborhoods, National Endowment for the Arts, and ITVS LINCS program. Her film El Corazón de Loisaida was recognized by the New York Public Library as part of their major film preservation initiative, Twentieth Century Mirrors: America Through the Eyes of Independent Filmmakers. Matías has written essays on film, arts, and the Latinx community for diverse publications. She is a founding board member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and In-Progress, a St. Paul, MN, media center. Her current work-in-progress is Coquito, a meditation on Puerto Rican history via this quintessential Christmas drink.
Alex S. Vitale (Producer) has written about policing and have consulted both police departments and human rights organizations internationally for over 30 years. It’s Just a Job is based on his book entitled The End of Policing. Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He also serves on the New York State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality-of-Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. Vitale’s academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. Vitale is an essayist, whose writings have appeared in the NY Daily News, NY Times, The Nation, Gotham Gazette, and The New Inquiry.
About the Speakers:
Senator Julia Salazar represents New York’s 18th State Senate District, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and Cypress Hills as well as parts of three other neighborhoods: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, East New York, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens. She began her advocacy while a college student at Columbia University, where she advocated for the rights of fellow tenants, domestic workers and service industry workers. Upon her election in 2018, Julia was the youngest woman elected in the history of the New York State Senate.
Senator Salazar serves as the Chair of the State Senate’s Committee on Crime Victims, Crime & Correction, and previously served as the Chair of the Committee on Women’s Issues from 2019 through 2020. She is also an appointed member of the New York State Council of the Interstate Commission for Adult Offender Supervision (ICAOS). She currently serves as the Treasurer for the legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Caucus and is an active member of New York’s Puerto Rican & Hispanic Task Force.
Phara Souffrant Forrest represents the 57th Assembly District in Brooklyn, which consists of the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill as well as parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. She was first elected in 2020.
Phara is the daughter of Haitian immigrants and a lifelong resident of the 57th District. She is a proud product of Brooklyn’s public school system, attending Philippa Schuyler Middle School and Benjamin Banneker Academy for Community Development. She then went on to attend SUNY Geneseo, where she majored in international relations, before obtaining an associate’s nursing degree at CUNY City Tech and a BSN at CUNY School of Professional Studies.
Since being elected, Phara has continued to champion the rights of tenants, as well as expanding access to healthcare and reforms to the carceral system. In her first term, she passed the Less Is More Act, which made the state’s supervision system more just and equitable. She believes that working-class New Yorkers deserve stable housing, affordable healthcare, and the resources to pursue a good life.
Jared M. Trujillo is an Associate Professor of Law at City CUNY Law School. Jared was the President of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, a criminal defense attorney, and a juvenile defense attorney. He is a former sex worker and a lot of his policy work and scholarship focuses on improving the lived conditions of sex workers.
(Film still photo credit: Scott Hein)
34 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
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NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
