Filmmaker, musician and broadcaster Sook-Yin Lee in her kitchen in Toronto, on Aug. 8. Lee’s house served as one of the backdrops to her new movie, Paying For It, an adaptation of her former partner Chester Brown’s graphic novel of the same name.If Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, then Kensington Market is a neighbourhood splintered into a thousand tiny, gritty dreamscapes. Wander down enough alleys, peer into enough windows, and you’re bound to encounter altogether different worlds.
Lee went through several versions of the script over the years, struggling to balance Brown’s journey as a character with the political elements of sex work and its historical criminalization that were both baked into the story and given fuller life in the book’s copious appendices and notes. “While reading the book for the umpteenth time, I noticed that Chester saw a sex worker on my birthday. So then it clicked as a story about questioning possessive pride, monogamy, how consensual sex work is still criminalized – arguments that could be hung on the setup of him and I living together,” says Lee, who now shares her home with musician Dylan Gamble.