Slamdance 2023 Film Festival – There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Sweetheart Deal is a tough documentary to watch. It follows four sex workers in Seattle’s Aurora area as they struggle to stay safe on the streets and grapple with drug addiction. While there are plenty of docs about sex work and addiction, the filmmakers really give an intimate portrait into the lives of these four women, along with a man nicknamed “the mayor of Aurora” who opens his RV and fashions himself a protector.

Directed by Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller and written by Karen Sim, the documentary follows Kristine, Krista (formerly Amy), Sara, and Tammy. Most of the women came from a middle-class lifestyle, and, for various reasons, ended up on the street and addicted to drugs. Their stories are heartbreaking, raw, and honest. Kristine is a wise-cracking welder who got into sex work after she couldn’t find other jobs. At one point, she lands another job but is fired after a urine sample proves she was high at work. Krista excelled in high school and college, until drug addiction took over. Sara, a divorced mother, lost custody of her kids due to her addiction, while Tammy turned to sex work as a means to support her parents. In fact, one of the most heart-wrenching scenes occurs when Tammy visits home and her parents express their fear that one day, she’ll end up dead and the family won’t be able to handle that. In contrast, Tammy says that she has no other way to support her folks. Like the other women, she’s essentially stuck in a no-win situation. These revealing scenes are vesical and impactful.

The four are given shelter and food by Laughn “Elliott” Doescher. It’s initially unclear what his motives are, but he fashions himself a friend to the women, offering them refuge.  In front of the cameras, he talks about drug addiction as a “monster” and wanting to help the women, who generally come to rely on him and trust him. Yet, cracks soon emerge. His role in the documentary also makes Sweetheart Deal much different than documentaries containing similar subject matter. Doescher’s troubling part makes for another compelling and emotional storyline.

The film was at least partially inspired by the 1984 documentary Streetwise, which is about Seattle’s homeless youth. Both show the city’s darker underbelly. Sweetheart Deal contains shots of dingy motel rooms and the women shooting heroin. It opens with one of them describing in fairly vivid detail rape and her constant dread that the man will find her again and kill her. Again, this one isn’t an easy watch.

As a whole, Levine and Miller’s documentary is an intense portrait of Seattle’s street life. Yet, for all of the troubling scenes, and there are plenty, the documentary isn’t without shades of optimism.  Sweetheart Deal contains important, unvarnished truths that give a more complete picture of Seattle.

8 out of 10