Nose and Tina
1980 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Norma Bailey
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
A brakeman and a sex worker who are in love navigate the everyday realities of sharing a home while dealing with pressures from work, money, and the law.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the sex worker narrative to either exploit or sanctify; Bailey just... lets them exist, and that refusal to perform moral geometry is genuinely radical—except it's so quiet you almost miss it.
Shot in 1980 by a documentarian alert to the rhythms of intimate life, this sits precisely in that lineage of observational cinema that trusts duration and domestic detail to carry emotional weight—the kind of film that reminds you why verité became an art form.
The decision to shoot this as documentary rather than fiction—to stay with the actual texture of their apartment, their bodies moving through space, their silences—is what makes the tenderness land; it's not performed, it's *witnessed*.