Street of ShameMovies like Street of Shame
- Key Features:
- Social commentary, Prostitution, Japanese cinema, Feminism, Poverty, Exploitation, Moral ambiguity, Social issues, Gender roles, Political conflict, Melodrama, Human trafficking, Sex work, Social injustice
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Fans of classic cinema, Viewers interested in social issues, Those who appreciate character-driven dramas, Students of film history
- Emotional Arc:
- Sympathy → Disillusionment → Resignation
Street of Shame

The lives of five sex workers employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law.
Street of Shame
A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.

In the shady black markets and bombed-out hovels of post–World War II Tokyo, a tough band of prostitutes eke out a dog-eat-dog existence, maintaining tenuous friendships and a semblance of order in a world of chaos. But when a renegade ex-soldier stumbles into their midst, lusts and loyalties clash, with tragic results. With Gate of Flesh, visionary director Seijun Suzuki delivers a whirlwind of social critique and pulp drama, shot through with brilliant colors and raw emotions.

In a Tokyo love hotel district, a woman is found dead in a derelict apartment. As police investigate, a romance novelist's wife lives a life that seems simply a daily repetition without romance. To break away from the loveless monotony, she follows her desires and becomes a nude model enacting sex in front of a camera. Soon, she meets a mentor and begins selling her body to strangers, while at home, she hides behind the façade that she's still the doting wife she's supposed to be.

In Edo Period Japan, a noblewoman's banishment for her love affair with a lowly page signals the beginning of her inexorable fall.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

The dawn of the 20th century: L’Apollonide, a luxurious and traditional brothel in Paris, is living its last days. In this closed world, where some men fall in love and others become viciously harmful, the women share their secrets, their fears, their joys and their pains.

A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.

A woman, Tome, is born to a lower class family in Japan in 1918. The title refers to an insect, repeating its mistakes, as in an infinite circle. Imamura, with this metaphor, introduces the life of Tome, who keeps trying to change her poor life.

In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients in a brightly lit glass box; in the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam haggles over the price of a teenage girl; and in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addicted women pray to a deity named Lady Death.

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

A woman from the country moves into to the big city of Buenos Aires to start a new life. Things are not going very easy and she soon finds herself working as a prostitute.

Salih is a mechanic and the son of a respected barber named Ali. A woman named Tina arrives at Cholera Street, where she takes up residence and works as a prostitute.

Fleeing a distressing family situation, Eiko, a very young girl, becomes an apprentice to Miyoharu, a veteran geisha. Both, determined to preserve their professional integrity, must face the selfishness and ambition of several petty people.

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 harsh young man seduces a freeloading young woman and eventually takes advantage of her knack for hitchhiking to rob middle-class men.

After a nuclear attack in Tokyo, the female population is attacked by infected males who have become sex-crazed zombies, hungry for human flesh. Officeworker Momoko and nurse Nozomi seek shelter in a Shinto Shrine, where they meet housewife Kanae and school girl Tamae. With no choices left to them, the group of girls decides to take a stand and arm themselves with assault rifles and explosives to fight off hordes of horny zombies. What is the secret to killing the zombies for good?

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

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 a tough yakuza gangster is betrayed by his bosses, it means all out war. Bodies pile up as he takes out everyone in his way to the top in a brutal quest for revenge.

Anna Tsuchiya blasts back in time playing an oiran, a top-notched geisha of the Edo period’s Yoshiwara District, navigating brothel politics while trying to cling to the man she loves.

Top Nazi officials, intent on rooting out traitors and those in the military who may be plotting to overthrow Adolf Hitler, recruit and train a group of beautiful prostitutes whose mission is to use any means necessary to uncover plots against the Fuhrer.

In the midst of a civil war, a pair of former violinists in a tempestuous marriage oversee a farm on a rural island. In spite of their best efforts to escape their homeland, the war impinges on every aspect of their lives.

The story follows a trio of Japanese youths of Chinese descent who escape their semi-rural upbringing and relocate to Shinjuku, Tokyo, where they befriend a troubled Shanghai prostitute and fall foul of a local crime syndicate. Like many of Miike's works, the film examines the underbelly of respectable Japanese society and the problems of assimilation faced by non-ethnically Japanese people in Japan.

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.

Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.

Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.

At the end of the 19th century, Shanghai is divided into several foreign concessions. In the British concession, a number of luxurious “flower houses” are reserved for the male elite of the city. Since Chinese dignitaries are not allowed to frequent brothels, these establishments are the only ones that these men can visit. They form a self-contained world, with its own rites, traditions and even its own language. The men don’t only visit the houses to frequent the courtesans but also to dine, smoke opium, play mahjong and relax. The women working there are known as the “flowers of Shanghai”.

When the wife of a 17th century Kyoto scroll-maker is falsely accused of having an affair with his best employee, the pair flee the city and find themselves falling for one another.

In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.

In a small Japanese village at the end of the 19th century, a rickshaw driver's wife takes on a much younger lover and the two conspire to murder him.

In the outskirts of Tokyo, a poor but close-knit group living on the fringes of society survives through shoplifting and odd jobs. When Osamu and his son take in a neglected young girl, their already fragile existence begins to unravel. As the family grows attached to her, buried secrets surface, forcing them to confront the true meaning of love, belonging, and what makes a family.

Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.

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?

After a night out with friends, Hyun Jae accepts a late night ride home from a young fire fighter. What begins as a night of promise quickly turns into a nightmare when she is abducted and imprisoned outside Las Vegas as a sex slave.

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.

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.

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.

Without a family, penniless and separated from her sister, a beautiful chaste woman will have to cope with an endless parade of villains, perverts and degenerates who will claim not only her treasured virtue but also her life.

Zachary, 17 years old, gets out of jail. Rejected by his mother, he hangs out in the mean streets of Marseille. He falls in love with Shéhérazade, a young prostitute of whom he becomes the pimp without realizing it...

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.

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.

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.

1965, Dominican Republic. At a seaside brothel, the lives of a group of prostitutes take a dramatic turn when freedom fighters stage a revolutionary coup, making them realise they can have a better life and perhaps find love. But everything changes when the US army supresses the revolution and takes the brothel as a military base: the girls will have to face the dilemma of either sleeping with the enemy or protecting their dignity at all costs.

Five men plot to steal a large sum of money from the local yakuza, but everything does not go as planned and the men find themselves hunted down by contract killers.

Residents of a rundown boardinghouse in 19th-century Japan, including a mysterious old man and an aging actor, get drawn into a love triangle that turns violent. When amoral thief Sutekichi breaks off his affair with landlady Osugi to romance her younger sister, Okayo, Osugi extracts her revenge by revealing her infidelity to her jealous husband.

Brandon, a thirty-something man living in New York, eludes intimacy with women but feeds his deepest desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. When his younger sister temporarily moves into his apartment, stirring up bitter memories of their shared painful past, Brandon's life, like his fragile mind, gets out of control.

A tale of revenge, honor and disgrace, centering on a poverty-stricken samurai who discovers the fate of his ronin son-in-law, setting in motion a tense showdown of vengeance against the house of a feudal lord.

After losing her parents, young flower selling Midori is put up by a fairground group. She is abused and forced to slavery, until the arrival of an enigmatic magician of short stature, who gives her hope for a better future.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

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.

Featuring interviews with performers, activists and past employees, this documentary offers a deep dive into the successes and scandals of Pornhub.

An American journalist travels through 19th-century Japan to find the prostitute he fell in love with but instead learns of the physical and existential horror that befell her after he left.

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.

The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.

A self-destructive man becomes a powerful member of the yakuza but quickly loses his self-control. Based on the true story of Rikio Ishikawa.

Heated tempers, frustrated desires and dashed hopes plague a diverse group of individuals whose lives cross paths in Mexico City. There is the bar-owner's son, Chava, who yearns to emigrate to America. A poor barber, Abel, is madly in love with the gorgeous Alma, who eventually becomes a high-class prostitute. Finally, there is Susanita, the desperate spinster who pursues many love affairs in hopes of finding a husband.

A comedic drama featuring two couples and two old friends in Mexico City. Tomas visits Carlos and Ana, while Miguel and Andrea are joined by Maria. The presence of guests triggers lust, rejection, infidelities, reconciliation and other consequences.

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.

Sang-hyun is always struggling from debt, and Dong-soo works at a baby box facility. On a rainy night, they steal the baby Woo-sung, who was left in the baby box, to sell him at a good price. Meanwhile, detectives were watching, and they quietly track them down to capture the crucial evidence.

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

A detective starts spiraling out of control when a wave of gruesome murders with seemingly similar bizarre circumstances is sweeping Tokyo.

Ryōko Itakura returns as the tough-as-nails government taxing agent. This time she must figure out a way to expose a fanatical religious cult lead by a corrupt sociopath.

Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.

Hoping to earn his mother's respect, a young hustler-turned-businessman tries to open a brothel with his two useless buddies.

Caye is a young prostitute whose family is unaware of her profession. She meets her striking Dominican neighbour Zulema, an illegal immigrant, after she finds her in the bathroom, badly beaten up. They strike up a close friendship unbeknownst to Caye's xenophobic co-workers.

A girl named O loves a rich, and much older man. She is subjected to a variety of humiliating experiences to prove her unconditional obedience to him in a Chinese brothel. A poor boy sees her and falls in love with her. To get the money needed to sleep with her, he takes part in rebellious acts.

In Lagos, Nigeria, young, naive Nigerian journalist Òlòtūré goes undercover to expose the shady underworld of human trafficking. Unused to this brutal environment, crawling with ruthless traders and pimps, Òlòtūré finds warmth and friendship with Blessing, Linda and Beauty, the prostitutes she lives with. However, she gets drawn into their lifestyle and finds it difficult to cope. In her quest to uncover the truth, she pays the ultimate price - one that takes her to the verge of no return.

A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.

Jack Flowers is an American hustler trying to make his fortune in 1970s Singapore in small time pimping. His dreams of building a fortune by running a brothel himself and returning to the States is materialized when he is offered the opportunity by the CIA to run a brothel for the R&R activities of U.S. soldiers on leave in Singapore.

An unapologetic former sex worker starts working at a bento stand in a small seaside town, bringing comfort to the lonely souls who come her way.

In a devastated, post-apocalyptic world, all men have turned into rape demons. The only hope for the future is to travel to the past and prevent the outbreak, the source of which still remains a mystery.

The story starts following an incident: a young girl jumps from the top of a building. The image provokes a certain dread, as the girl appears to have been a corpse even before she jumped. The case is dismissed, yet more and more of these suicides occur, and all from the same building. Thus began the rumour, that a ghost inhabited the rooftop of the building.

A chronicle of the life of a middle-class French girl's sexual adventures, her then fall into prostitution, and her ultimate redemption.

Roman police detectives interrogate a series of potential perpetrators in their struggle to determine whom to arrest for the brutal murder of a beautiful prostitute whose body is discovered in a park on the day of a torrential rainstorm. One by one, the prime suspects -- girl-crazy teenager Nino, pickpocket Canticchia, a soldier on leave, a tourist and a pimp -- recount the events of the day to the police, each insisting he is innocent.

Sex & Fury chronicles Ocho's exploits as she searches for her father's killers, each identified by unique tattoos on their backs (a deer, a boar, and a butterfly). Along the way, she also crosses paths with Shonusuke, a radical set on murdering prominent politician Kurokawa and Christina, an American spy posing as a gambler.

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.

Shuhei is leading a tough life. His alcoholic mother Akiko can only hook up with bad guys and order Shuhei to go get money from his disapproving grandparents instead of going to school. Except raising the little half-sister, his rock-bottom life seems to have no end.

A strange virus turns 90% of the world population into Lust eating Zombies. However, in Akihabara, Japan, some males were found to be uninfected. These men team up with the Zombies to go after the flesh and blood of surviving young women to fill their lust. The women survivors must fight to survive in an apocalyptic Japan.

In this story inspired by real characters, three girls from America, Nigeria and India are trafficked through an elaborate global network and enslaved in a Texas brothel, and must together attempt a daring escape to reclaim their freedom.

Taken in by the yakuza at a young age, Kenji swears allegiance to his old-school boss, pledging to adhere to the family code amid ever-changing times.

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.

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.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

A Japanese photojournalist revisits Vietnam after the liberation to document the nation, and begins following and documenting the young children from a poor Vietnamese family.

A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.

During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.

A New York journalist lies when his fake story about a pimp describes a real pimp up for murder.

Franco Lucci is an entrepreneur on the verge of bankruptcy. The salvation of his company hangs on a large public contract that he could obtain thanks to the intervention of a minister who has become a friend and whom he has invited to dinner. Together with Michele, his partner and brother-in-law, Franco has organized the perfect evening: in addition to paying him a large bribe, the two arrange for him to find a girl willing to sleep with him in exchange for a recommendation. All under the eyes of Rita, Franco's wife, who tries to indulge her husband in his last desperate attempt to obtain the million-dollar contract. Because of the girl, the evening takes an unexpected turn.

Murakawa, an aging Tokyo yakuza tiring of gangster life, is sent by his boss to Okinawa along with a few of his henchmen to help end a gang war, supposedly as mediators between two warring clans. He finds that the dispute between the clans is insignificant and whilst wondering why he was sent to Okinawa at all, his group is attacked in an ambush. The survivors flee and make a decision to lay low at the beach while they await further instructions.

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.

A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.

A young boy takes interest in piano while his family begins to disintegrate around him after his father loses his job.

Convinced of the final outcome, a team of scientists travels back in time to stop the spread of a virus turning men into zombified rapists through society and causes them to finally uncover the source of the deadly disease which causes them to attempt to stop it before it happens again.

In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysterious Lady Wakasa, as well as Tobei's desire to become a samurai, run the risk of destroying both themselves and their wives, Miyagi and Ohama.

The wealthy president of a company has built up an unpayable debt to a local crime lord, and to escape punishment he sells his famous dancer wife to the lecherous old man figuring a 90 year old can’t do too much bad with her. Perhaps not, but others can while he watches. She’s put on stage in an underground BDSM sex show and begins a spiraling decent from strongly independent woman to submissive sex slave



