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The film portion of the Ursula project focuses specifically on two women living in Kono District, both twenty years old, both mothers of young children, and both with dramatically different individual experiences of sex work.
Fanta entered prostitution for the first time immediately after the war, and galvanized a group of her friends around her to begin working in town together. Their group established its own set of rules and the girls, thirteen years old at the time, developed a hierarchy of leadership among themselves to respond to the realities of working in the park and to their living situation, sharing a single roof and resources with a gang of boys their age who served alternately protective and exploitative roles.
Momie entered prostitution while living in a refugee camp in Guinea, and she eventually made her way back through Liberia to Kono after the war, continuing her life on the street in the lorry park. Her experience as a sex worker has been largely individual and lonely. Rather than moving through these spaces with girlfriends, she moves alone and into relationships with men who provide her with resources she needs at a particular time: shelter, health care for her daughter, or the promise of love.
Teaser TRT: 1 minute 3 seconds. A short glimpse into the past-present emotional landscape in which Momie and Fanta live, the spaces they navigate and relationships they depend on.