Puff

Puff is German slang and means brothel. This project was shot over 18 months in one of the best-known brothels in Switzerland, where prostitution is legal: the “Rote Villa”.

Puff is a story about strong women and their everyday life as prostitutes living and working in the Rote Villa. Challenging the historic ideal that sex is a sacred act, instead seeing it as a traded commodity much like coffee. Most of the women come from Eastern Europe and have had a pretty rough life in one way or another. With unemployment rates being what they are in Eastern Europe and the fact that most of the women have not had access to a solid education gives them limited chances of earning good money in a regular job. Prostitution for them is a way to be able to support themselves and their families back home. For them it is the best way of survival, selling their bodies as a commodity to lonely men.