Gina Bon Bon is shown at her home in Las Vegas in this handout photo. "League of Exotique Dancers" by Toronto director Rama Rau profiles eight women who are members of the Burlesque Hall of Fame and still perform onstage. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ho-Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival
April 27, 2016 - 7:38 AM
TORONTO - The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival kicks off Thursday with a look at aging burlesque dancers in Las Vegas.
"League of Exotique Dancers" by Toronto director Rama Rau profiles eight women who are members of the Burlesque Hall of Fame and still perform onstage. The oldest of the women is 86.
The Canadian Press spoke with Rau about the doc, which is the festival's opening-night film:
CP: How did the film come to be?
Rau: My producer, Ed Barreveld, came to me and said, 'Do you want to make a film about burlesque?' and I said, 'I don't really care about 20-year-olds stripping. Like, who cares?' So we hired a researcher and we said, 'Find us something that we could actually make a film about.' She told us about Vegas and the Burlesque Hall of Fame.
I wanted to trace the death of burlesque and the revival through these women and I think what we really wanted to tell was a story about aging, about beauty, about alternative ways of looking at feminism.
CP: What did these women tell you about their careers?
Rau: The film will go backstage, it goes into their lives, it goes into a lot of the sexism they faced, it goes into a lot of the racism they faced and a lot of the ways they were treated.
Also what people don't know is that they made a lot of money but they also spent it. The film goes into addiction. They had a lot of addiction issues on both drugs and alcohol, breast cancer because they were all forced to have silicone injections.
CP: There's another film at this year's Hot Docs fest which follows the same subject matter, "Tempest Storm," about "the world's greatest exotic dancer." Is there something to that? Are audiences seeing the empowerment in this type of job now?
Rau: I think so. I think women are finally beginning to discover that older women are empowering, that we can learn so much from them and that older women are sexy.
— This interview has been edited and condensed.
News from © The Canadian Press, 2016