Painted Angels...

Story of a brothel in the mid-west of America... First feature of Jon Sanders and co-writer Anna Mottram.  

I’ve always felt that communism solves the problem of class but overlooks the problem of man and woman which still remain afterwards...
Kenji Mizoguchi

In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.
Michael Ondaatje

Dance girl tries to arsenic her way from Leadville
Newspaper headline.

KATYA: I’ll slit her throat that bitch-Telling me to be quicker. If I could make them fuck faster she thinks I wouldn’t?
EILEEN: you know why she doesn’t / that’s where she keeps the money
Dialogue – Painted Angels

300 of the dead in Boot Hill died violently – 200 by guns, over 50 by knives – some were pushed under trains a popular and overlooked form of murder in the west.

Originally I had the idea of making a western about immigrants where the cowboys and gun men spoke with European accents. For some reason I had been describing to Anna Street of Shame, Mizoguchi’s last film about prostitution in 1950s Tokyo. The film has stayed with me ever since I had last seen it. Anna said we should write the film using Mizoguchi as our guide. It was not until we started the research that we realised what extraordinary unchartered territory we were getting into.

Vertigo interview with Jon Sanders
Painted Angels will open in London on November 20 at the Renoir.