Irina PalmMovies like Irina Palm
- Key Features:
- Grandmother, Desperation, Sacrifice, Family, Financial hardship, Taboo subject matter, Moral dilemma, Sex work, Social stigma, Character study, Redemption
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Independent film viewers, Drama enthusiasts, Those interested in social issues, Viewers seeking character-driven stories
- Emotional Arc:
- Desperation → Determination → Acceptance
Irina Palm

Maggie, a quiet retiring grandmother, finds herself helpless as her grandson’s health deteriorates. When one last chance appears, but money is desperately short, Maggie acts to raise the cash in a fashion that surprises everyone but her.
Irina Palm
After she and her husband lose their jobs, a former Texas homecoming queen inadvertently finds herself in the middle of a prostitution ring after she unknowingly accepts a position at a massage parlor.

35-year-old Alice has a husband and a son. Her life seems a beautiful dream, but it soon turns out to be a nightmare. Her husband dies in a car accident and her lawyer tells her that she is on her uppers. The only way she has to earn money in a short time is by resorting to the oldest job in history.

A young woman, recently released from a mental hospital, gets a job as a secretary to a demanding lawyer, where their employer-employee relationship turns into a sexual, sadomasochistic one.

A young sex worker from Brooklyn gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as his parents set out to get the marriage annulled.

Self-described misanthrope Elle Reid has her protective bubble burst when her 18-year-old granddaughter, Sage, shows up needing help. The two of them go on a day-long journey that causes Elle to come to terms with her past and Sage to confront her future.

A sex-addicted con-man pays for his mother's hospital bills by playing on the sympathies of those who rescue him from choking to death.

Two young women find themselves struggling to survive in Paris, street-wise Nathalie, a stripper, and naïve Sandrine, a barmaid. Together, they discover that sex can be used to their advantage, and pleasure.

Susana leaves her life in Paris, where she works as a model, and returns to Madrid to take care of her grandmother Pilar.

An unlikely friendship forms between 21 year-old Jane and the elderly Sadie after Jane discovers a hidden stash of money inside an object at Sadie's yard sale.

Jae-Young is an amateur prostitute who sleeps with men while her best friend Yeo-Jin "manages" her, fixing dates, taking care of the money, and making sure the coast is clear. When Jae-Young falls in love with one of those men, she suppresses her feelings towards him in respect of her friend who's jealous.

When Sam learns his mother cannot afford to send him to another school after he is kicked out, he and his friends start their own escort service for mature women to pay for his tuition.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

Mimma starts working in Madame Colette’s brothel to help her boyfriend financially. There she is rechristened “Paprika,” and falls in love with her first client, naval officer Franco. Despite this attraction, she begins her climb through the sex trade, residing in Italy’s most illustrious brothels.

A grandmother has a passionate affair with a man half her age, who is also sleeping with her daughter.

Nancy Stokes, a retired schoolteacher, is pretty sure she has never had good sex. Now that her husband has died, she is determined to take a tour of sexual vistas that until now she has only imagined. She even has a plan; it involves an anonymous hotel room, and a sex worker who calls himself Leo Grande.

To help her financially struggling mother, a teenage girl turns to escorting and meets a wealthy man who makes a proposal she can't refuse.

An aspiring actress makes a pact with her fiancé to take a job as an exotic dancer to care for her cancer stricken father. Once the pact the couple made is broken, their lives are changed forever.

Marino Pacileo has a soft spot for gambling. When he discovers that Lila's father, the young Chinese girl that he is in love with cannot pay a debt, the gambler steals money from the jail he is in to help the love of his life.

Fresh out of prison, a former debt collector working for a gangland boss is told he has a terminal brain tumour. In an attempt to atone for his past he rescues a young girl from trafficking, forcing him into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with his boss.

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.

Maggie is an alluring free spirit who won't let anyone – or anything – tie her down. But she meets her match in Jamie, whose relentless and nearly infallible charm serves him well with the ladies and the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical sales. Maggie and Jamie's evolving relationship takes them both by surprise, as they find themselves under the influence of the ultimate drug: love.

Retired porn star Milos leads a normal family life trying to make ends meet. Presented with the opportunity of a lifetime to financially support his family for the rest of their lives, Milos must participate in one last mysterious film. From then on, Milos is drawn into a maelstrom of unbelievable cruelty and mayhem.

Aleksandra is a student from Krško, a small town in Slovenia. She has a plan to conquer the world. Working as a prostitute, her life is heading to where she wants it, but an accidental death has her wrestling with new feelings of fear, loneliness, confusion and responsibility

The relationships of two couples become complicated and deceitful when the man from one couple meets the woman of the other.

Emma, a French novelist aged 27, decide to go to Berlin and join a brothel to uncover the prostitution world, the subject of her new book. Such as gonzo journalism, Emma become a prostitute and her experience, which was supposed to last a few weeks, will last two years. Was writing her book an excuse for Emma to live a shameful fantasy?

A gallerist risks her family and flourishing career when she enters into an affair with a talented painter and slowly loses control of her life.

In the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, a starving family find hope in a charismatic hotel owner. Lured by the prospect of a free dinner, they discover that the evening's entertainment blurs the lines between performance and reality. Will they wind up the spectators or the spectacle?

A routine trick propels a tall, dark, cynical hustler into a series of life-changing encounters in this drama. But this amicable and sexually efficient rent boy begins to look at himself differently when he finds himself lost in a maze-like apartment building. As he wanders through the building, he tricks with a variety of johns; sex is the commonality, but out of that commodity comes raw, unguarded emotions for all.

An orphan girl taught magic by her sick grandma must find work in seedy Bangkok, where she encounters a number of unsavory characters. She uses the magical skills her grandmother taught her to her advantage and to increasingly horrific consequences.

On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as "Sugar Mamas" —European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise, moving from beach to beach.

When a brothel closes because of new laws, four of the prostitutes decide to go into business running a restaurant. They discover they cannot escape their past.

When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.

Bounced from her job, Erin Grant needs money if she's to have any chance of winning back custody of her child. But, eventually, she must confront the naked truth: to take on the system, she'll have to take it all off. Erin strips to conquer, but she faces unintended circumstances when a hound dog of a Congressman zeroes in on her and sharpens the shady tools at his fingertips, including blackmail and murder.

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.

Ann, a frustrated wife, enters into counseling due to a troubled marriage. Unbeknownst to her, her husband John has begun an affair with her sister. When John’s best friend Graham arrives, his penchant for interviewing women about their sex lives forever changes John and Ann’s rocky marriage.

A very typical post-Soviet era storyline. A bunch of vagabonds lured an innocent teenage girl to their apartment, offered her a drink, intimidated, then gang raped her. Local cops are incapable to undertake an adequate actions against the scoundrels - prevented by the superior chief of the local police, who is the dad of one of the scumbags. The case is closed. The girl's granddad tired of an endless circumlocution decides to take revenge in his own hands.

Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.

When a self-destructive teenager is suspended from school and asked to look after his feisty alcoholic grandmother as a punishment, the crazy time they spend together turns his life around.

Desperate to be free from her drunken, unloving mother Diane, the beautiful, scheming young Mini seduces her stepfather Martin and soon convinces him to join her in a sadistic scheme to have Diane declared insane. But their conspiracy soon escalates to murder and when John Garson, a young detective starts investigating, Martin and Mini begin to turn on each other.

A Russian teenager living in London dies during childbirth but leaves clues in her diary that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.

Herman has a weakness for strip clubs. Donny has a thing for condiments and Tiffany is a newly celibate martial artist. These are Andy's new friends after he unsuspectingly follows his dream girl into a sexual addiction recovery group. At first this seems like the best possible news! However, Andy's professional and personal life begins to unravel as he deepens his ties to this lovable, but damaged group.

Two doctors in Victorian England use manual stimulation of female genitalia to cure their patients' ills, leading to the invention of the vibrator.

Léo, a 22-year-old homeless sex worker searches for genuine love on the streets of Strasbourg.

Maurice is an aging veteran actor who becomes taken with Jessie, the grandniece of his closest friend. When Maurice tries to soften the petulant and provincial young girl with the benefit of his wisdom and London culture, their give-and-take surprises both Maurice and Jessie as they discover what they don't know about themselves.

A middle-aged businessman faces bankruptcy after his partner's suicide and a rival's unscrupulous offer to buy his company. Determined to avoid the trap, he finds an unexpected solution through a prostitute.

After murdering his daughter's drug-dealing boyfriend, a wealthy ad executive stumbles into a bar and strikes up an uneasy alliance with Joe Curran, a drunken bigot with a bloodlust who works at a local factory.

Alice, a perfect wife and mother, lives happily with her husband and child until the day she discovers he is living a double life that has ruined her financially and left her a single mother. Alice fights back and dives into a world beyond anything she has ever known.

The family of Raymond, his wife Val and her brother Billy live in working-class London district. Also in their family is Val and Billy's mother Janet and grandmother Kath. Billy is a drug addict and Raymond kicks him out of the house, making him live on his own. Raymond is generally a rough and even violent person, and that leads to problems in the life of the family.

Frustrated by the lack of intimacy in her relationship, a young schoolteacher goes through a series of intimidating and often violent sexual partners.

An adolescent girl, living with her mother and her grandmother, will have her first sexual experiences in a heavy and excessive way.

A former prostitute works to create a new life for herself in a small town, but a shocking discovery could threaten everything.

When her parents' financial problems threaten Ashley's dreams for college, the high school whiz kid takes matters into her own hands. She and her girlfriends turn their babysitting business into a wildly successful escort service for dads. But in this small suburban community, nothing stays secret for long.

After suffering from a heart attack, a wealthy elderly Russian man plans to will most of his estate to his estranged daughter, but his titular wife has other plans.

To support her family, Maria works as a trafficker of surrogate mothers, transporting them from place to place along a river — but when one disappears, Maria is left with the task of finding her and must enter deeper into a world she wishes to escape.

Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.

In New York City, a husband and wife butt heads with the granddaughters of the elderly woman who lives in the apartment the couple owns.

After a blow to the head, Abby decides she can't do it anymore. Her life just can't be only about the house, the kids and the wife. She needs more: she needs to be Eleanor.

Desperate for a good story, a sex-addicted journalist throws himself into the world of high-class escorts when he starts following a Stanford-educated prostitute.

A father is without the means to pay for his daughter's medical treatment. As a last resort, he partners with a greedy co-worker to rob a casino. When things go awry they're forced to hijack a city bus.

With her husband Jack perpetually away at work, Margaret Hall raises her children virtually alone. Her teenage son is testing the waters of the adult world, and early one morning she wakes to find the dead body of his gay lover on the beach of their rural lakeside home. What would you do? What is rational and what do you do to protect your child? How far do you go and when do you stop?

A repressed gay man develops an unlikely friendship with a young masseur who teaches him to embrace life.

Jin-a, a young prostitute, moves into a seaside motel called the Birdcage Inn, run by a dysfunctional family. Struggling with her circumstances and the family's treatment, she forms an unlikely bond with the daughter, Hye-mi. As they navigate love, betrayal, and personal growth, their friendship ultimately leads to a deeper understanding and a chance for redemption.

The rivalry between the manipulative boss of an advertising agency and her talented protégée escalates from stealing credit to public humiliation to murder.

Sam Ellis is a man on the rise — a hot-shot federal prosecutor on the cusp of a bright political future. But what was meant to be a one-time experience with an escort turns into a growing addiction — a new demon threatening to destroy his life, family, and career.

Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.

A young Romanian woman and a recovering drug addict launch an unlikely investigation after her parents are murdered by a vicious serial killer known as The Headhunter.

A young medical student struggling to pay tuition is drawn into the shady world of underground body-modification.

Recently fired and facing eviction, a new dad has his life turned upside down when he meets a wealthy couple who offer a path to financial security... but at a price.

Jules is a drag artist in London who withdraws into himself and loses his career after a horrific attack. Months later, he recognizes one of his assailants in a gay sauna and quickly realizes he has the perfect opportunity to get revenge.

After becoming orphaned, a lonely girl moves in with her grandparents and tries to befriend a sick, bed-ridden boy next door, despite his mother’s strong objections. Her persistence leads to a friendship, but during secret visits, she uncovers dark secrets in the boy's home.

Michael and Joanna are a young and successful married couple who appear to have it all. But when Michael finds himself alone on a business trip with an attractive new colleague and Joanna encounters the other great love of her life, each is thrust into an evening of temptation.

A fidgety, wisecracking video store clerk develops a fixation on a particularly reclusive customer, a frequent visitor to the pornography section of Cinefile, the video store where he works in Los Angeles. After multiple failures to impress her during their brief daily transactions, he finds her street address in the store's database, drives to her apartment building and initiates an unconventional campaign to win her affections.

Amy, a naive college graduate who believes she's destined to be a great poet, begrudgingly accepts a job at a sex shop while she pursues a mentorship with reclusive writer Rat Billings.

A Texas cop, whose own daughter might have been forced into sexual slavery, joins forces with a Mexican youth to find the boy's sister, who was abducted and forced into prostitution. Meanwhile, a Polish woman who was promised a better life in America also becomes a victim.

Anthony Richmond schemes to get the fortune of his tyrannical, wheelchair-using tycoon uncle Charles Richmond by persuading Maria, a nurse he employs, to marry him.

Max is 6 years old. She lives with her dad Toni, a small time crook with a golden heart. For Xmas, Max offers him Rose, a call-girl found on the street whom she’s very fond of. Despite the complicated situation, Toni’s gonna have a hard time refusing her daughter’s «gift» and must coexist with Rose.

A social drama about four marginalized prostitutes in Marrakech and their complex relations with their families and society at large.

After hitting rock bottom in Los Angeles, former porn star Mikey Saber returns to his hometown in Texas to stay with his estranged wife and mother-in-law. Just as tensions begin to ease, he becomes infatuated with a young doughnut shop worker named Strawberry.

A retired businesswoman – who tries to control everything around her – decides to write her own obituary. A young journalist takes up the task of finding out the truth, and the result is a life-altering friendship.

Eccentric 70-year-old widow purchases the Windmill Theatre in London as a post-widowhood hobby. After starting an innovative continuous variety review, which is copied by other theaters, they begin to lose money. Mrs. Henderson suggests they add female nudity similar to the Moulin Rouge in Paris.

A retelling of the biblical book of Hosea set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush of 1850.

A tough undercover cop inadvertently gets involved in a dangerous heroin ring when a young defector of the drug trade leaves his five year-old sister in his care.

Maria, who's not as young as she used to be and who helps people older than her, is living from hand to mouth. She can't quite accept her precarious situation and steals a few euros here and there from all those lovely people she looks after with such devotion, and who adore her for it… But after an accusation of abuse of a vulnerable person, Maria winds up in police custody.

When a struggling musician can't afford her rent, she signs up for a website where rich older men pay to date younger women. Her new money-making venture sends her down a dark rabbit hole that forces her to grow up fast, shaping her music, and how she sees the world.

The increasingly politicised Emanuelle gets deeper into fighting an international trade composed of sex, violence and high profile players.

France, World War II. In order to somehow make ends meet, the mother of two children, Marie Latour, does underground abortions and rents a room to a familiar prostitute. She doesn't pay any attention to her husband, who returned from the war because of his injury and lives her own life. Abortions gradually begin to bring a good income, and boredom can be easily dispelled by starting a young lover.

A romantic comedy that brings together three disparate characters who are learning to face a challenging and often confusing world as they struggle together against a common demon—sex addiction.

Mikey and Rose are professional assassins. They are also lovers, and once upon a time Rose also knew Mikey's father. During an elaborate hit job for a malicious gangster, Rose fails to kill the main target, the gangster's pregnant girlfriend. Instead, she delivers her baby and convinces Mikey to help her protect them both. As Rose weakens from cancer, Mikey becomes breadwinner for this unusual family. But tranquility will not last.

After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

Claire is a midwife and has devoted her life to others. At a moment when she is preoccupied by the imminent closure of the maternity clinic where she works, her life is further turned upside down when Béatrice, her father's former mistress, turns up on the scene. Béatrice is a capricious and selfish woman, Claire's exact opposite.

A journalist tries to balance the duties of marriage and motherhood while researching a piece on college women who work as prostitutes to pay their tuition.

Love comes without asking. Often not to those, not so and not then. Can a genuine feeling survive when everything started wrong and the whole world is against it? Give up everything or give up? Burn or survive?

Struggling to survive in post-WWI Copenhagen, a newly unemployed and pregnant young woman is taken in by a charismatic elder to help run an underground adoption agency. The two form an unexpected bond, until a sudden discovery changes everything.

Following a breakdown and suicide attempt, an aging actor becomes involved with a much younger woman but soon finds that it's difficult to keep pace with her.

Eve Stephens, a beautiful and sexy high-powered attorney, is up for appointment as a judge. But below her veneer of self-confidence lies a darker side, one in which she is driven by bizarre visions and sexual fantasies. After a series of events, including rescuing her sister Madelyn after her arrest for shoplifting, being rejected by her lover John during a surprise visit, and finally, meeting with the Governor regarding her judicial appointment, Eve comes unraveled. In a stunning and climactic conclusion, Eve is forced to confront her fears and, more importantly, herself.

Muriel is beautiful, free-spirited and bed-ridden since a horrific accident. Leo is a drunk middle-aged ex-boxer. Desperate for work and unqualified, he interviews for Muriel, who hires him to cook and care for her against her better judgment. Initially out of his depth, Leo slowly wins Muriel's trust. As Muriel teaches him to read, he forces her to confront the joys beyond her window.

A woman employs a gay man to spend four nights at her house to watch her when she's "unwatchable".

The life of a woman is transformed after she is diagnosed with a terminal disease, fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend. Given two months to live, she throws caution to the wind to pursue her dreams.

