BERLIN — “Is it pornography or is it art?” Artists and filmmakers taking part within the Porn Movie Competition Berlin (PFFB) are not any strangers to this query. Pushing again towards inflexible boundaries between erotic movie and artwork, the annual six-day competition creates an inclusive, sex-positive house for exploring human want.
This 12 months, PFFB celebrated 20 years since its founding by filmmaker and producer Jürgen Brüning. Attendees of the opening evening on Tuesday, October 21, packed Colosseum Filmtheater in Berlin’s residential Prenzlauer Berg.
“I produced porn in the ’90s and thought that the division between porn and art was stupid,” Brüning stated as he acquired an award for his groundbreaking work operating the unbiased, non-commercial competition. Wieland Speck, a filmmaker and the previous head of Berlinale Panorama, spoke to the significance of Brüning’s imaginative and prescient as a producer and founding father of various movie areas. Among the many movies Brüning has produced are No Pores and skin Off My Ass (1991) by Canadian artist and queercore cinema pioneer Bruce La Bruce, which performed within the Berlinale Panorama in 1996.
Whereas Brüning usually emphasizes that there are unhealthy and good movies in mainstream porn, difficult the stereotypical view of the business as monolithically rotten, the competition has championed many different filmmakers and kinds. Paulita Pappel, PFFB coordinator and founding father of the unbiased pornographic manufacturing firm Hardwerk (which had a devoted movie program within the competition this 12 months), celebrated the occasion’s embrace of all types of movies, reflecting feminist, LGBTQ+, kink, and gender-fluid communities. The competition is about “porn, of course, but also body politics,” Pappel stated onstage on opening evening.
The competition’s organizing workforce onstage throughout opening evening, with Founder Jürgen Brüning third from left (picture Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
“Working at the festival really showed me that it’s possible to live in a society where people have a more ethical and joyful relationship to porn. It’s created a community that’s inspiring and energizing,” she later advised Hyperallergic in an interview.
The competition’s mission to interact with social and political questions whereas cultivating a welcoming, playful atmosphere is mirrored in its programming. This 12 months included not solely movies, but additionally workshops and talks on feminist porn, porn writing, lesbian fisting, deep throating, and different matters. Some occasions have been hosted by way of its Grownup Trade Discussion board, now in its fourth 12 months, a two-day convention and networking occasion for business professionals. Its key focuses vary from moral requirements and intercourse schooling to advertising and marketing and social media methods.
One of many competition’s throughlines is the robust protagonism of girls in porn, not simply as stars however as makers. “We have always supported each other,” the sexologist Laura Méritt stated about Brüning and the competition to Hyperallergic. Along with Polly Fannlaf, Méritt co-founded the feminist pornography prize PorYes Feminist Porn Award in 2009.
Erika Lust was among the many main business figures in attendance at PFFB. The movie producer, whose first shorts confirmed right here in 2006, based her personal manufacturing firm and platform for erotic cinema. She was the topic of a particular program this 12 months and produced the movie Sorrow Bay (2022) by Casey Calvert, which was highlighted by the competition as a uncommon portrayal of the sexuality of girls over age 60.
Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang is one other competition stalwart. “It means so much to be here. You know, my movie I.K.U. (2000) was the opening film at the festival when it started in 2006,” she advised Hyperallergic, noting that she has been returning ever since. Cheang stated that she is presently in Berlin engaged on a brand new manufacturing. She additionally made a brief movie depicting the sexuality of older males; Brüning, who produced various her movies, together with Uki (2023), is likely one of the actors. At this 12 months’s competition, she introduced Wonders Wander (2017), a four-episode net serial celebrating the resistance of intergenerational queer communities and monitoring websites of transphobic and homophobic violence on the outskirts of Madrid.
Left: Polly Fannlaf and Laura Méritt; proper: Shu Lea Cheang on opening evening (picture Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
PFFB performs a vital function in connecting sex-positive, feminist, and LGBTQ+ communities throughout nationwide borders, supporting filmmakers from international locations whose governments suppress LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights or the place violence towards queer and trans folks is rife. This 12 months, the competition introduced the Taiwan Porn Shorts part, with themes starting from exploring sexuality whereas residing with cerebral palsy to erotic futuristic fictions.
This 12 months’s opening movie, Fucktoys (2025), starring and directed by Annapurna Sriram, completely embodies the competition’s sense of joie de vivre. It tells the story of AP, a younger intercourse employee within the American South whose life unravels after a psychic reveals that she’s cursed. When she’s fired as an unique dancer, AP and her buddy Danni (Sadie Scott) flip to dangerous acts, together with taking up a consumer with a harmful fetish for sharp objects. Regardless of this dire setting, the movie is a moderately buoyant satire on the “good girl” trope, mixing pathos with loads of comedy and camp.
Throughout a chat after the screening, Sriram stated that she had grown up watching John Waters and thought she would make comparable movies. However she quickly found that the business wasn’t open to filmmakers and actors of shade.
“I wanted to create representation for other Brown girls like me who are queer and slutty,” Sriram stated. She added that she’s attuned to the truth that erotic cinema is especially susceptible to being stigmatized as inferior or obscene. “I always hate it when I’m called dirty. That always stings,” she stated.
Daring, provocative, playful, and extremely political, Fucktoys is the quintessential PFFB movie. Nonetheless, Sriram stated, it lacks wider distribution.
“We’re fucking around with fascism in America. They don’t want to see this kind of art being made,” Sriram advised the viewers. “Film companies are bending the knee to the Trump administration rather than fighting. That’s why communities really matter, getting off Instagram and showing up in person really matters.”
Competition Coordinator Paulita Pappel (left) and director Annapurna Sriram (proper) (picture Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
The competition presents unconventional experiences for viewers to that finish, experimenting with various types of cinema-going. One among its beloved occasions, the Lengthy Night time of Lesbian Intercourse returned for a second 12 months at Kino Moviemiento in Kreuzberg, exhibiting movies in two theaters concurrently. The viewers is inspired to speak all through and to depart, re-enter, and change rooms every time they like. Watching two movies directly, in fragments, and mixing it up with drinks within the lounge, was extremely liberating. It demystified erotic cinema as viewers commented on scenes out loud and cracked jokes. Equally liberating was experiencing erotic cinema as a communal enjoyment to be shared in real-time.
Mixing earnest movie tradition with kink and enjoyable extends to the competition’s alternative of venues. Colosseum is a basic cinema whose purple velvet curtains and proscenium stage are a throwback to pre-streaming grandeur; the closing celebration, in the meantime, was hosted by Klub Verboten (translating to “Forbidden Club”), a fetish-friendly membership whose attendees are scrupulously vetted earlier than turning into members or coming into playrooms. Prior to now, PFFB has thrown events in areas similar to Ficken 3000, a queer bar the place the celebration roars upstairs, whereas the darkish rooms downstairs are supposed for intimate discuss and play.
PFFB’s eclectic style means championing westerns, horror, and B-movies in addition to artwork movies and animation. Crime motion pictures are robust this 12 months, as highlighted by the programmers. Documentary can be strongly represented, together with movies depicting sexual lives or reclaiming key figures in queer and sexual histories.
Nonetheless from A Physique to Reside In, directed by Angelo Madsen Minax, wherein an aged Musafar embraces Grin after their intimate suspension (picture courtesy HARD FLOW)
Within the first grouping, the titular protagonist in Denis Côté’s “Paul” (2025) runs an Instagram account referred to as Cleansing to Save My Life, which he makes use of to satisfy dominant girls to wash their houses in trade for S/M classes. Very similar to Sriram’s Fucktoys, the movie depicts kinky cleansing routines in an off-the-cuff, recent method.
In the meantime, Angelo Madsen’s visually immersive movie A Physique to Reside In (2024) tells the story of the little-known body-piercing motion in Nineteen Seventies California by way of the biography of its non secular chief, Roland Loomis, also referred to as Fakir Musafar. Mixing testimonials from the motion’s individuals with Musafar’s personal telling and archival supplies, together with his tv appearances, the movie deeply engages the connection between bodily ache and non secular transcendence, whereas additionally querying its chief’s cultural appropriations of Indigenous and South Asian rituals.
One other notable hybrid movie this 12 months is Limitless by Wojciech Puś. The filmmaker himself completely illustrates the porousness of boundaries between erotica and artwork, together with his observe incorporating movie, pictures, set up, and digital actuality. In Limitless, he stylistically juxtaposes his protagonists’ metaphysical reveries and confessions of deeply rooted malaise with scenes of sexual acts.
Nonetheless from Limitless (2024), directed by Wojciech Puś (picture courtesy Wojciech Puś)
The movie performs like a ghost story, but touches actuality, presenting the existential angst of its trans and nonbinary forged, who collectively occupy darkish condominium interiors in Warsaw and an expensive mansion in Germany belonging to a queer artwork seller. Puś challenges the narrowness of gender transition as a linear, time-bound, “before-and-after” expertise. In his telling, this bodily timeline bleeds into the afterlife, as if his characters have been talking from past the grave, establishing a way more expansive, consummate, darkly poetic imaginary.
“I was super happy when [Brüning] invited Endless to screen at the Porn Film Festival Berlin, because I see this event as a significant, counter-culture platform, so needed these days,” Puś stated. “In the face of growing fascism, nationalism, anti-queer movements, it feels like a needed harbor for the independent auteur cinema.”
