Nicola Mai
Directing
Biography
Nicola Mai is an ethnographer and filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at Kingston University, London. His main research interest is the negotiation of gender, sexuality and subjectivity through the migration process, with particular reference to the globalised sex industry as a contested and ambivalent space of control and autonomy. In his academic work and films, Nick problematises prevailing understandings of the global sex trade as characterised by exploitation and victimisation, by showing the complexity of the subjective investments of the people involved. In his Sex Work Trilogy, he explores differents meeting experiences between migration and the sex industry.
Known For
In this innovative blend of documentary and fiction, Rosa and Paloma, two trans Latina sex workers in Queens, New York, fight transphobic violence, persecution from the police, and defend their cases of trafficking in an increasingly anti-migration political environment in the U.S.
Caught
Normal is a biographical film that follows the turbulent lives of people who work in the sex industry. Nicola Mai's groundbreaking and unique form of story telling offers an intricate glance into 6 characters' diverse experiences of self-realization, exploitation, autonomy and dependency. Director and anthropologist Mai continually challenges the viewer by exposing these unheard voices, their dreams and the lives that they lead. Normal uncovers layered, human stories of migration and sex work, challenging popular expectations that most migrant sex workers are exploited and forced to sell sex against their will.
Normal
Travel (Mai 2016; 63 min) is a two-screen film-installation and ethnofiction presenting the life history of Joy, a Nigerian migrant woman selling sex in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Joy left Nigeria in order to help her family after the death of her father. She knew that she was going to sell sex before leaving, but was unaware of the hard working and life condition she would have had to face in France. Travel explores Joy’s experiences of self-realisation and exploitation in the sex industry by representing the way she gradually reinterprets her experience of migration and freedom as also characterised by exploitation and trafficking.
Travel
An ethnographic account of the life history of Karim, an Algerian migrant man selling sex as a travesti at night in Marseille.