'Plaza de la Soledad' explores the lives of sex workers

About a decade ago, award-winning photographer Maya Goded published a book about female sex workers in Mexico City. Now the story about those women is reaching the big screen in the documentary “Plaza de la Soledad.” The film competes at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary category and marks Goded’s first time directing a long doc. It features half-a-dozen women who offer sexual services at a popular public square in the historic neighborhood of La Merced and which lends its name to the doc’s title.

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER Goded's incursion into filmmaking is preceded by her extensive and globally recognized body of photographic works that explores the issues of female sexuality, prostitution and violence against women, according to her biography. Her photos have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States, Latin America, Europe, China and Africa.

The Mexican City-born photographer has won various honors from the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the Guggenheim Foundation in the U.S., National Council for Culture and Arts in Mexico, and the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands. TURNING TO MOVING IMAGES Reportedly, her interest in video may have started in 2009. A year later she worked as a director of photography on “Dormitorio 10”, a documentary about HIV and AIDS in Mexico City’s prisons. She would screen her first short, "Una Reina a su Gusto," at the Morelia Film Festival in 2011. Her credits on the website of the Internet Movie Data Base also lists her as a photographer in “Whore’s Glory,” a doc about prostitutes in Bangladesh, Thailand and Mexico City.

“These pictures come from the need to find answers to certain questions that unconsciously led me to wander through streets and squares, watching the people who inhabit them,” she said about her photo book. “I grew up in Mexico City, where the Catholic moral decrees what should be a 'good woman,' mystifying motherhood and virginity.” TRIBECA GRANT ​ In 2013, Goded’s “Plaza de la Soledad” documentary proposal won a grant from the Latin American Arts Fund of the Tribeca Film Institute, the organizer of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film competes on a field of 12 documentaries that also include another Latin American selection, Peru’s “When Two Worlds Collide” about an indigenous environmental activist. Other countries represented in the competition are: Poland, Iraq, China, Belgium, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Iran, Germany, Israel and Japan. ––CESAR ARREDONDO