SAVING SIN CITY/DOC REVIVAL

Want to make a serious but fun documentary? Where better than Las Vegas, where there is no shortage of exotic subject matter and there is no chance of being bored?

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This year’s BritDoc Festival in Oxford worried that too many documentaries were lacking in humour, or at least unduly serious, and in danger of giving the genre a bad name.

No such problem for Saving Sin City (which, speaklng of names, is pretty useful, even if it does have connotations of religion and redemption).

Here is the gambit: SSC is the story of one Annie Lobért (above), whose mission is to help prostitutes find a new and better life away from their controlling and often violent pimps.

Oh, oh, sounds overly earnest?

But the saving grace is that dear Annie was herself a former high class prostitute in Las Vegas and has only belatedly become a Christian.

In other words, this is a documentary as much about a fascinating woman as it is about a clean-up campaign.

Saving Sin City will be shooting in LV over the next four months, following Annie as she builds up the non-profit organization, the wonderfully named Hookers For Jesus, and covering the stories, often heartbreaking, of those she is attempting to save.

The film is produced by VooDooDox, the new documentary division of London based VooDooDog , award winners for opening credit sequences such as the recent Love In The Time of Cholera.

It is being co-directed by VooDooDog’s Noel Donnellon and Russ Coffey.

Posted July 21, 2008.