At the NY Jewish Film Festival: “The Impure”—Yes, nice Jewish girls and women were prostitutes in Argentina
More timely than ever—think trafficking and violence against women, think Time’s Up‑ “The Impure” (New York Jewish Film Festival Jan. 16) digs into Argentina’s subculture of Jewish prostitutes and pimps in the massive immigration from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s.
Argentina’s legal prostitution attracted Eastern Europe’s Jewish underworld, riding the wave of 100,000 Jewish immigrants, mostly male. “Impuros” was the term created by the respectable Jews of Argentina to distinguish themselves from the similar-looking immigrants in the sex trade.
What opens as workmanlike documentation–shots of neglected headstones, black-and-white stills of 1880s Buenos Aires, soulful music–gets interesting as the film’s director discovers his own family connections to the sex trade.
One comment on “At the NY Jewish Film Festival: “The Impure”—Yes, nice Jewish girls and women were prostitutes in Argentina”
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Just saw this movie last night. During Q and A with the director, an elderly audience member said, essentially, that the movie was ‘a shande far di goyim’ (washing out Jewish dirty laundry before the goyish world) and why not make a movie about prostitution in Amsterdam’s red light district, or the Place Pigalle in Paris? Why make a movie about Jewish pimps and prostitutes? The director answered beautifully that he is a Jewish and Israeli director who makes movies on Jewish topics for Jewish audiences, without worrying about how they will be taken by the larger world. Bravo! Although, in the movie he did in fact broaden and update the topic most deftly by including a modern-day former Buenos Aires prostitute (who I doubt was Jewish) talking heart-rendingly about the violence and humiliation visited on her by pimps and clients. It was a way of saying, let us not forget that this still goes on, that this is a universal issue.