Nicole Bazuin on Modern Whore: Presenting a New Archetype of Sex Work
What Modern Whore Is About
Modern Whore is an 80-minute hybrid documentary directed by Nicole Bazuin, developed through a long-standing creative partnership with Andrea Werhun. Building on earlier short films and the memoir Modern Whore: A Memoir, this feature blends stylized reenactments, animation and first-person interviews to reshape familiar “victim or villain” narratives about sex work. Werhun leads the film, reclaiming and performing her story in ways that foreground agency, nuance and complexity. The film premiered in Alberta at the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
The Creative Partnership of Nicole Bazuin and Andrea Werhun
Bazuin and Werhun’s collaboration spans multiple short films, a book and now a full-length documentary. Their long creative relationship has allowed them to grow together as artists, combining Werhun’s skills as a performer and writer with Bazuin’s background as a visual artist and director. That continuity has deepened their trust, enabling projects that shift form and tone as their ideas develop.
Bazuin recalls meeting Werhun on the set of a 1960s-style music video where they unexpectedly had to share the go-go dancing role. That first day of collaborating and improvising established a playful, creative foundation for their work together. Over time their relationship evolved into a mutual “creative crush” — a deep artistic rapport founded on shared tastes and complementary skills. They have since coauthored an expanded 300-page edition of the memoir and translated that multimedia sensibility to film.
Blending Media: Why the Hybrid Approach?
A defining trait of their work is a multimedia approach. On the page, the memoir interweaves photographs and visual motifs; on screen, the documentary alternates between animation, stylized staging and documentary interviews. Bazuin explains that both collaborators are “shapeshifting” artists with diverse interests, and that mixing forms lets them represent the many facets of Werhun’s life and identity—her private self, her performer persona and her relationships with friends, clients and family.
The hybrid format offers freedom to move between tones—comedic, theatrical, intimate and serious—so the film can show both the lighter, joyful moments and the darker, more challenging experiences without flattening either. This flexibility mirrors the book, where writing style and imagery shift to match the mood. For Bazuin and Werhun, hybridity is a deliberate choice that better captures the layered reality of a life lived across different roles and contexts.
I wanted it to feel like a colourful stage show where the lights are a palette unto themselves – Nicole Bazuin on the visual language of Modern Whore
Production Design, Colour and Tone
Colour is a key expressive tool in the film: bold purples, neon greens and saturated tones recur across costume, set design, lighting and animation. Bazuin attributes the vivid palette to both personal taste and the creative team, including cinematographer Nina Djacic and production designer Chareese Steinhoff, who helped realize an intentionally expressionistic look.
Bazuin describes the film as subjective and expressionistic: the camera and design choices invite viewers into Werhun’s interior perspective. The theatrical sensibility—often feeling like stepping into the pages of Werhun’s book—lets emotion be heightened and stylized, using light and colour as part of the storytelling vocabulary.
The film oscillates between more extreme, over-the-top moments and something quieter – Nicole Bazuin on pace and tone in Modern Whore
Balancing Theatricality with Intimacy
Alongside stylized reenactments, the film contains quiet, grounded conversations that anchor the narrative. We see Werhun speaking with fellow sex workers, with her partner Oliver, and most poignantly, with her mother Rosalie. Those scenes provide intimate counterpoints that humanize the performer and reveal the emotional reality behind the spectacle.
Bazuin says these intimate moments offer necessary contrast: they give the audience a chance to breathe and to connect with the people on screen in a straightforward, human way. The scenes with Werhun’s mother, for example, quietly demonstrate unconditional love even amid disagreement, and that simple representation carries a powerful emotional weight.
How Contemporary Films Are Portraying Sex Work
Bazuin welcomes the recent growth in films that portray sex work with nuance. She hopes projects like Modern Whore—in which a sex worker has creative agency and tells her own story—contribute to cultural shifts around shame, stigma and policy, including the fight for decriminalization. Bazuin stresses that Werhun’s story is her particular experience and not a representative account of all sex work, but she hopes the film encourages more true-to-life portrayals and opens space for sex workers to tell their own stories.
Addressing misconceptions, Bazuin notes the film opens by naming the common pop-culture tropes—sex workers as “victims or villains”—and then works to undermine them. By offering a different archetype, the film seeks to give audiences a more nuanced, realistic view of sex work. Importantly, Bazuin emphasizes that the project resists being dour; even when it confronts difficult topics, it retains humour, warmth and vitality. That tonal range, she argues, is essential to portraying people as fully human.
What’s Next for Bazuin and Werhun
Their partnership shows no signs of slowing. Bazuin says the response to the film has renewed her energy and suggests that more collaborative work is likely—possibly a sequel or other projects that continue to explore the themes they’ve become known for. For now, they’re letting audiences respond and staying open to where the collaboration might lead next.