Paying For It

This screening took place on Monday, February 17, 2025 at 8:00 pmYukon Theatre

ALFF Audience Choice Award-winner for Best Canadian Feature Fiction!

When an introverted cartoonist's girlfriend wants to redefine their relationship, he begins sleeping with sex workers and discovers a new kind of intimacy in the process. An adaptation of the Graphic Novel by Chester Brown. 

Encore screening Feb 17. ALFF passes will be honoured for encore screenings. Passes can be redeemed at Yukon Cinema box office.

Vancouver-born former MuchMusic VJ and CBC Radio host Sook-Yin Lee comically adapts the autobiographical 2011 graphic memoir, Paying for It, written and illustrated by her former partner, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. Based on the end of their actual relationship in the 1990s, the charming sex work comedy explores Brown's subsequent decision to give up on romantic love and start exclusively paying for sex as the title suggests.

Starring Dan Beirne as an agreeable version of Brown joined by Emily Lê as the slightly fictionalized Lee stand-in, Sonny, a "MaxMusic" TV host, and Modern Whore author Andrea Werhun, a former sex worker herself playing one here, the earnest film casually eschews normative sexual conventions to explore healthy transactional companionship involving intimacy and intercourse. - Rick Chung, Rick Chung Movies.

Director Sook-Yin Lee was in attendance for the February 9 festival screening.

Content advisory: nudity, mature themes, sexually suggestive scenes, sexual language.