The 3rd Berlin Porn Film Festival was a blast. It was the first time I actually made it out of my little small town home office and dipped my toe into the pool of erotic filmmaking and in-your-face sexual entertainment. It’s a pity I had to travel halfway around the world to do it, but it was well worth the effort.
The festival went from the 22nd to the 26th of October and showed a wide range of films, all of them dealing with sex and porn in some way. The title is something of a misnomer because very few of the movies fit into the standard “porn” mould in the way most people understand it. This wasn’t a dirty raincoat event. There was plenty of hardcore, explicit sex on screen and a lot of it was arousing but on top of that was a desire to explore ideas, challenge assumptions and generally to present erotic material in a new way. So much porn is cliched, standardised and boring; the films I saw in Berlin were anything but.
For me the short films were where creativity and humour really shone. Everyone I spoke to absolutely adored The Window, a glorious testament to exhibitionism and the male body. There was also a lot of support for The Blindness of the Woods, a rather unusual film blending fairytale and 70s porn via full-size woollen puppet suits. The winning short film was the Spanish lesbian short A Passion for Football, a cute and quirky story about what happens when a husband doesn’t pay enough attention to a wife.
I’ve also posted about a couple of my other favourites here, including the Teat Beat of Sex series which features in the above video.
There were plenty of amazing feature films on show and one of the more frustrating things about the festival was trying to decide which one to see, as you inevitably had to miss something good. Although I’m not sure I’m going to recover from sitting through Three Days of Darkness, a horror film best described as a Filipino lesbian apocalyptic Blair Witch Project. It was the most frustrating and exhuasting thing I’ve ever seen – but I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.
A highlight was the big-screen world premiere of Petra Joy’s Feeling It (Not Faking It). Petra and her muses Belle and Mia Magic got dressed up for the event and spread the champagne around (and I may have had just a tad too much) and once again I found myself going to pieces at the general gorgeousness of that film.
Meeting people was for me the best thing about the festival. I had a bit of a drunken chat with Eon McKai from Vivid Alt and also a long, detailed discussion about censorship and the future of porn with European porn pioneers Ole Ege and Willem van Batenburg. The latter presented a fantastic lecture and screening of his short erotic films from the 70s and made me realise that there’s nothing new under the sun. His films are surprisingly female-friendly and feature techniques and ideas that I think many women want to see in modern porn movies.
Of course I was over the moon to finally meet Petra Joy and snatch a few minutes out of her ridiculously busy schedule for a talk about her work. And I made good friends with the sexy guy behind Hirsuit Pursuit erotic music… whose secret identity I am bound never to reveal.
I also had a ball with Audacia Ray who I’ve known online for some time. Her workshop “What does feminist porn look like?” was very entertaining although naturally nothing was resolved. It never is when you start talking about porn for women.
I also really liked her new film Dacia’s Love Machine and she had audiences enthralled with stories of reviewing sex toys for a living.
Dacia introduced me to Jennifer Lyon Bell from Blue Artichoke Films. Jen is another kindred spirit and we hit it off immediately. She is due to release her first feature film Matinee very soon and I really like what she’s doing with her work. She’s running the Rated X erotic film festival in Amsterdam in January 2009. Jen’s array of Dutch friends helped us to discover that German margheritas are very tasty indeed and that, yes, you can fit 16 people around one table in a Mexican restaurant.
Each night the festival moved up the road to a stolid brick building that had previously housed a Turkish supermarket – the Night Bar. Here amid thumping music and copious quantities of cigarette smoke (blergh!) we were treated to a variety of sexy stage acts, all compered by the delightful Lazlo Perlman. Yes, that’s him stripping to “Show Me Your Pussy” on the video and yes, he did.
I think the night bar reached a climax on the Saturday night when Mouse took to the stage and did a number of frightening things with goldfish and a speculum. Not that I could see much, squashed towards the back, although this came in handy when she used her ass as a beer fountain. I did get a better view of The Fisting Club act featuring Judy Minx and the gorgeous Wendy Delorme. Phew. Sexy. My husband found it very amusing that I had my freebie rubber glove on, ready to go, but alas, few are called. I do wish I’d made it to the fisting workshop run by Wendy on the Friday – Jen and Petra said it was quite the experience.
Wendy also stars in Emilie Jouvet’s impressive short The Apple. I think I’m now a fan. That’s her dancing in the video, along with Lazlo, Louise de Ville and gay performers Brett and Skunk.
We didn’t find time for much sightseeing in Berlin itself apart from a wander around the block on the cold, rainy Monday after the festival. Berlin is a fascinating place; rather austere in architecture and heavily weighed down with history. Underneath the surface, however, is a seriously fun, welcoming place where it only takes two people opening a beer for a party to happen.
I really enjoyed the unpretentious, intellectual vibe of the place, especially at the festival. I laughed to find myself at the night bar surrounded by so many different people: a guy with a blue mohawk next to a butch lesbian, a guy with dreadlocks down to his waist next to a thin man in nicely pressed pants and an extremely nerdy sweater. And we were all just having fun.
I can’t wait to go next year.
Thanks to the festival organisers for inviting me.
About The Video
Yes, it’s very amateur. We didn’t have any decent sound or lighting equipment and just filmed stuff on the fly. Thanks to Petra Joy and Signe Baumane for excerpts from their films. I’m editing a longer version of the video (and of this article) to appear at For The Girls in December.
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