“People meet me and they go, you’re real! They can’t believe it,” says Sandra Pankhurst, the subject of Lachlan Mcleod’s second documentary, Clean.
Pankhurst is a person who has led many lives within a life: adopted as a child, then severely abused by her adoptive parents; emerging from a failed marriage and coming out as a transgender woman in the 1980s; working as a drag queen and sex worker; and eventually starting her own cleaning business in the 1990s. Late in her life (she died in 2021), Pankhurst became a public figure after the publication of Sarah Krasnostein’s expansive, heartfelt and award-winning book about her life and line of work, The Trauma Cleaner, in 2017.
