UvA students host first Porn Film Festival
This weekend the first Porn Film Festival Amsterdam is screening over 30 blocks of short porn films. Artistic, political, and above all exciting. ‘And if they turn me on, too: Hooray!’
This weekend the first Porn Film Festival of Amsterdam debuts. The organisation Filmhuis Cavia is showing porn and ‘sex-positive’ films in their cinema and in the De Uitkijk cinema. Among other things, the nearly sold-out festival wants to show that sex is not taboo, says organizer and master's student in philosophy Coco Kokoschka. She explains: ‘These porn films normalize sex and sometimes make a political statement through sex. We want to reclaim diversity in pornography.’
The festival grew out of a perceived need by a group from the Film House, which annually attended the porn festivals in Berlin and Brussels. ‘I was pretty nervous the first time I went myself,’ Kokoschka admits. Until she[BA3] thought to herself: Yes, why do we actually get so uncomfortable about sex? That's how ‘Kissable Screens,’ porn screenings that went by storm every time, came into being at Cavia. ‘Amsterdam clearly needed this,’ the UvA student thinks. ‘Sometimes I wonder how gay-friendly this so-called ‘sex-positive’ city is. For example, the mayor wants to establish a sex center outside the Red Light District. There is now so little space to discuss this with sex workers and local residents.’
Arousing themes
The festival organizers maintain a broad definition of porn. In some films, you see everything, from masturbation with an arsenal of weapons in ‘Stranger in Paradise’ to intimate, anal penetration in the Brazilian Homem de Verdade. Other films show no genitals at all, as in the witty ‘Naked Snails,’ about the mating of snails, or in the South Korean ‘Archiving Men,’ which shows the vulnerable position of the queer.
‘We really want to arouse you,’ explains Luisa González, co-organizer and doctoral student in Latin American studies. ‘But not within heteronormativity, which focuses on the female body and what she should look like.’ González hopes viewers will be stimulated not only intellectually, but also sexually ‘by diverse bodies, diverse porn, and by things you might not have known you liked.’
To introduce filmgoers to other genres, the festival is experimenting with themes other than ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay’ or ‘BDSM.’ ‘Not that we want to turn you from lesbian to straight or anything like that,’ Kokoschka explains, ‘but we want to offer a whole palette of flavours to people. For example, we have a theme of ‘science-fiction,’ a film block that is very diverse and goes from very extreme to supersoft.’
Community
Many of the filmmakers will also be present in the coming days for Q&As, a party at the co-organizers of squat Vrankrijk, or a chat with the public. ‘It's kind of a community already,’ González says. Some actors play in multiple films and some actors also produce films themselves, or filmmakers act in their own films.
‘The French actress Manon Praline, for example, sent in as many as 10 films,’ Kokoschka says, smiling. In any case, the bulk of the films were submitted from abroad. For example, the festival shows porn from Ukraine, Chile and even a film from strict Thailand that criticizes the Thai monarchy through homosexual scenes.
But the festival organisation's main intention is to attract people from outside the usual community. It may be confrontational for some newcomers, Kokoschka thinks. However, the organization stresses that people share the joys and burdens of the precarious screenings. ‘It's not like everyone is just going to jerk off here.’ Because, argues the philosophy student, ‘I find the films beautiful, artistically fascinating, or politically interesting. And if they turn me on, too: hooray!’ Opportunities for arousal aplenty: Through Sunday, the festival is still showing more than 100 short porn films.
