Within a dramatic fiction that maintains a subtle balance between social realism and theatrical stylization, Emily Barbelin depicts, for her first film, the lives of a group of young sex workers in a world governed by the desires of the men who punctuate their nights. We rarely see these men, fleeting figures, either asleep or caught in pure fits of violence. A woman's voiceover addresses a distant mother, a winter landscape scrolls by the window of a train and welcomes the expressions that describe them. To be loved by whom, freed from a plot, ascends to a liberating climax in a non-linear montage that proceeds in bursts (of laughter, violence, tenderness). Why do they do this job? A thousand reasons that one can surmise. The film does not seek to explain them. The director chooses to portray their shared intimacy in the sidelines of their profession: communal baths, drunken nights and escapes between women, discussions in hoodies around a table, waiting for customers in the darkness of the hostess bar... When she focuses on the tired looks and faces, she succeeds in making a film inhabited by their choreographed bodies, neither sensual nor erotic. The three young women are so alike that it's hard to tell. They are not sisters but form a common body. "One for all, all for one," Emily Barbelin seems to be telling us. It is in this gap between the cheapness of the costume and the artificiality of the shady spaces, reminiscent of Fassbinder, and the skin-deep sensitivity of their exchanges that the portrait of To Be Loved By Whom lies: them, "the straw girls," universal, caught between their desire for poetry and the crass triviality to which men reduce them.