Porn Film Festival

Porn Film Festival
Porn Film Festival Vienna 2021 »4 years of porn«
The fourth edition of the Porn Film Festival Vienna was packed with literally so much: an art exhibition, juicy parties, and, of course, screenings over screening of pornographical films: short movies, documentaries and feature films. The fourth festival explored the questions of the last three years: »What is sex?«, »What is shame?« and »What is porn?«. Opening film was the powerful and entertaining mockumentary »The Sad Girls of the Moutains«.
This year’s edition of Porn Film Festival Vienna is not a retrospective! Yet, it is worth looking back over the last three years and again reflecting together the questions we already asked before. Presenting brand-new film material, once again we want to find out What is porn? (2018), What is shame? (2019) and What is sex? (2020).
You might chuckle, but it's not that simple! Because who has the normative power to define what we are dealing with? Where does sex start, where does it end? What is porn, what not? Why is the naked human body still perceived as a provocation and often gives rise to feelings of shame? And why, at the same time, can it be so liberating, so much fun and pleasure, to watch porn not just secretly at home in a dark corner, but publicly and together with other people on a big Silver Screen?
Mainstream discussions about porn simply label it off as a form of oppression - and whereas there is truth to this - it ignores the fact that there is an entire community of marginalized people who use it as a tool to reclaim the representation of their bodies, thereby threatening dominant patriarchal structures. For a long time, mainstream porn has had little to do with authentic sexuality. In the best case, it is a high-performance sport and in the worst case, inhuman and exploitive. As such, what is the solution? In the words of feminist sex-educator and theorist, Annie Sprinkle, “The answer to bad porn isn’t no porn… it’s to try and make better porn!” And we say, let’s not just lead an open and public discussion about porn, sexuality, body politics, and gender roles, but also shape porn culture through new impulses and our very own fantasies and desires! That this is not an easy task, we surely know!
Sex and shame are still closely connected and the naked body itself is still as politically charged as nothing else. But why not use the political power of bodies and sexualities to articulate a body-positive answer to all the shaming, to create sex-positive spaces, and to break taboos! To sum it up, why not make the world a better place through better sex and better porn?
Topics that make supposedly private matters public – and thus political! – deserve to be discussed unprejudiced, open, and controversial. Therefore, the Porn Film Festival Vienna wants to take a stand: We want to promote diversity, sexual freedom, and self-determination. We want to put a focus on feminist and queer productions, an important step to show the diversity of people, their bodies, and their desires. We want to offer a platform for pornography in its various manifestations! Because guess what? Porn is not only the “smutty cesspool” many people think it is. The Porn Film Festival Vienna wants to provide an open and welcoming space for reception, discussion, and reflection and to challenge and broaden horizons. Because porn can be lustful, honest, friendly, and self-determined!
At a time, when once again we have to defend abortion or LGBTQI* rights - e.g., in Poland or Hungary -, when due to climate change, we should rather fuck each other than our planet, when a global pandemic challenges our everyday lives, and therefore too our sexuality, in such a time, we say, a porn film festival can be more than just entertaining! It can also be empowering, visionary, utopian, sustainable, solidary, and unifying! Yavuz Kurtulmus / Jasmin Hagendorfer Founder & Festival Director / Co-Founder & Creative Director
EXHIBITION »FUCK CULTURE, DESCRIPTIVE«
The Porn Film Festival Vienna has analysed sex, gender, and politics through a pornographic lens for over three years. In an increasingly hybrid and fragmented world, it is a commonplace that we constantly need to renegotiate the politics of our bodies, sexualities, and pornography. This year we are focusing on the three main themes of the festival, the questions: "What is Porn?", "What is Shame?" and "What is Sex?". The result can be seen in our hands-on, real-world exhibition.
But in a more and more hybrid world, where digital and physical worlds meet, the shape of sex, gender, pornography, and politics is renegotiated in the virtual and physical day-to-day interactions. Forums like Pornhub, Grindr, Tinder, even a lot of computer games, are a significant gateway to experience and perform sexuality and ultimately (re)create power structures. We cannot not talk about them, to paraphrase McLuhan, because we would neglect a big chunk of the sexualities of the 21st century. Alas, this year's festival will come with an additional online update. We created a MOZILLA HUB for the PFFV! A virtual exhibition space! Let the bright light of post porn politics shine on all the dark unspoken corners of the internet!
Curated by Joshua Alena & Jasmin Hagendorfer An exhibition cooperation between PFFV & monochrom
Location physical: Raum D, MQ, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien Location online: Mozilla Hub: https://hub.link/oCaXjj7 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Thea Ehre, Daniel Hill, YOUPRON, Aaron Moth, Hidéo SNES, Anthoniy Val, Iztok Klančar, Ann Antidote, Diana Andrei, Damien Thorn, Leon Chevalier, Natalia Portnoy, Luca P.O.R.N.A.M.O.R.E., Feline Hjermind, Offerus Ablinger, Olivia Scheucher, Benjamin Brommer, Christiane Peschek, Nick Romeo Reimann, Kenneth Constance Loe
EXHIBITION: October 2 - 10, 2021 open October 3 - 10, 2021 / 3 PM - 7:30 PM / 3-G Rule + FFP2 Vernissage: 02.10.2021 open 6 PM - 10 PM / 3-G Rule + FFP2 Performances: “Chez Hidéo’s Cake Porn" by Hidéo SNES 2.10. starting 6 PM “Fugue Four: Response” by Olivia Scheucher & Thea Ehre & Nick Romeo Reimann & Luca P.O.R.N.A.M.O.R.E. 2.10. starting 7 PM & 9.10. starting 4 PM
Andreas Brunner has been active in the Vienna LGBTIQ+ movement since the late 1980s, in the Türkis Rosa Lila Villa, as an employee of the first gay bookstore "Löwenherz", co-founder of the Rainbow Parade and as an exhibition curator.
Since 2009 he has been co-director of QWIEN - Center for Queer History, carries out research and publications on queer city history, the development of queer city walks and the establishment of an archive for the history of LGBTIQ+ in Vienna.
Manuela Kay, born and raised in West Berlin. Journalist, author, and co-managing director of Special Media SDL Verlag, co-publisher and co-CEO of the magazines "Siegessäule - Queer in Berlin" and "L-MAG - Das Magazin für Lesben".
She has published several books, including "Schöner Kommen" (Querverlag, 2000), made sex-positive films such as "Airport" (1994), was co-producer of "Fucking Different XXX" to which she contributed the short film "Blümchensex" and has been co-organizer and curator of the Pornfilmfestival Berlin since 2007.
NO_PIC_NO_CHAT is a visual artist. He creates movies, photography and objects. Since 2018 he explores the representation of masculinity and intimacy in photography.
His work is strongly based on the theory of monomyth by Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Carl Gustaw Jung (The Red Book). He makes an artistic statement refering to collective archetypes through videos and the creation of objects and performative situations
Alice Erik Anouk Moe is a queer, sexpositive, interspecial, subculture-addicted, fashion and genderfcking, drag performing activist who considers themselves Genderfluid & intersectional in expression and personality.
They are an art medium working with their body to show binaries, contradictions, dichotomies in order to overcome the dividing dogmas that for decades have been tearing us apart through art mediums such as film, video, talks, vlogs, poetry, interviews, performance, shows, music & social work.
Paul Poet , born 1971 in Abqaiq, Saudi-Arabia, is an internationally acclaimed Austrian Film Director and Author, studied philosopher, curator and culture journalist, a denizen of Viennas punk and electronica scenes and the erotic underground of the 90s.
He continually mixes pop culture and political activism with the core theme of individual freedom in a more and more close-knit World Order. He currently prepares his first narrative cinema feature with Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days, Goodnight Mommy) as his producer.
Emre Busse , born in 1990, Istanbul, Turkey. Emre Busse worked as head curator of the Berlin based queer art project, Pornceptual between 2014 – 2017. During his Pornceptual years, he co-directed numerous porn and documentary movies including, “Hyper-Masculinity On The Dance Floor” and “Landlords - Economics of S&M Apartments in Berlin”. In March 2017, he co-curated the exhibition called “ğ-queer forms migrate” in Schwules Museum* Berlin (LGBT History Museum of Berlin) supported by the Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa. Emre Busse is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Freie University Berlin, focusing on gay ‘ethnic’ pornography in post national Europe.
Johnny Love is the stage name of Vienna based director, dj and media artist David Kleinl. Best known for his role as the singer of the alternative pop duo Tanz Baby! he later became a music video director for artist such as Bilderbuch or Ankathie Koi. By the end of the 1990s he used pornographic imagery for the first time in multimedia performances with his then experimental rock band Charmant Rouge.
He studied media art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the ZKM Karlsruhe. His first porn film „ACTION 1“ was awarded for best Austrian short at our festival in 2019.
Kitty Willenbruch / Comedian Sideshow Extravaganza / Super B Movie Scream Queen / Salon Kitty Revue Master Mind / Jury Member of Landshut Kurzfilm Festival and Cinestrange Festival for Dead Line Magazine
Nominated as the most Beautiful Tattooed women in the World by Tattoo Magazine California, that was in the 90ies bitches, yes she’s not looking that old!
Doris Posch is a film and media scholar and a lecturer at the University of Vienna, Austria. She loves doing research and teaching on transnational, postcolonial, and emerging filmmaking and keeps herself busy with lectures and panels on African and Caribbean film cultures and Diasporas, gender politics, intersectionality and film festival research, and hosting masterclasses and panel discussions at the intersection of film theory and practice.
She is co-founder of CineCollective and since 2019, she is co-director and curator of the open air film fest Kaleidoskop – Urbanities Film Festival at Karlsplatz, Vienna.

This is why porn film festivals are so important
Words Megan Wallace All Images Courtesy of Four Chambers
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Providing spaces for individuals to thrive without stigma and helping alternative creatives reach new audiences, festivals are vital for the future of adult entertainment.
If you’re used to watching porn alone, accompanied by nothing but your iPhone’s judgemental glare, you might be surprised to hear that porn film festivals are regularly celebrated across the world: from Brazil’s PopPorn Festival to London’s Porn Film Fest. However, watching porn en masse is far from a novel idea — it’s actually pretty old school. Back in the days before tube sites, watching erotic film was a communal activity to be enjoyed in porn theatres (if you’ve seen Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart , you’ll get what I mean).
To some degree, porn film festivals can help create a sense of community beyond our current, atomised ways of consuming porn which do little but make us feel isolated in our kinks. One of the longest-running of these is Berlin Porn Film Festival , which first opened its screens in 2006 and by platforming indie, queer and feminist voices has had a hand in shaping the kind of radical good that porn film festivals can create.
From 22 to 27 October, BPFF celebrated its 14th edition, hot off the heels of the PorYes Feminist Porn Awards Europe , which is also held in the German capital. It makes sense that Berlin holds two of the most important events for the porn community — as you’re no doubt aware, you can’t walk through Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg for more than five seconds without bumping into queer kink clubs and vegan, feminist sex shops aplenty . What’s less clear to the uninitiated, particularly if you like your adult entertainment free, accessible and anonymous, is why these events are so important.
BPFF regular Four Chambers is an i ndependent porn producer that creates erotic film through an arthouse lens. In this year’s edition, they showcased four films: Forged Obscenities , an exploration of censorship and obscenity; Archetype , a series subverting traditional porn archetypes; orgy film The Reverence; and Atrophy Portraits II, a visual essay about submission selected for the “Porn as Poetry” screening. In order to hear first hand why festivals like BPFF are so vital to the porn community, HUNGER sought out one of the individuals behind Four Chambers: porn director and performer Vex Ashley.
For Vex, the importance of porn festivals is in the way that they platform and uplift creatives whose work and labour are undervalued by our sex negative society. “For me, my favourite thing about porn film festivals is that they act as a way to celebrate work and communities that are rejected or devalued by the mainstream,” Vex says. “It’s about unity and community and proving that what we do does have value; that it’s important and valuable and hot and that we’re not faceless or disposable.”
As she succinctly puts it; “it gives us a rare place to exist without stigma.” This is, undeniably, the greatest value that porn festivals hold — especially in a world where individuals in the field still bear the brunt of anti-sex-worker bias and ignorant prejudice from wider society. However, they can also offer important experiences for the consumers of porn. “Festivals give people a place to watch work about sex in a community space, not hidden away on their phone. It brings it out in the open.”
You can scoff all you like at the notion of porn being placed in a “community space” but this is true to the art form’s roots, particularly within queer subcultures. With designated time slots for guy-on-guy features, porn theatres of yesteryear offered an important outlet for gay and bisexual men to socialise and hook up in cities like NYC, before ultimately being obliterated by both police crackdowns and the popularisation of VHS. For anyone who still thinks that porn is exclusively for solo time, it would be worth reading Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney, where the writer mourns the gentrification of Times Square (which displaced porn theatres and peep shows) and details how porn theatres helped him to create a queer network and navigate his own sexual journey.
Even if we bypass tube sites, adult films need not only be showcased via what few porn theatres remain or in porn festivals: they can also be celebrated within the wider film festival circuit. Scottish Queer International Film Festival , for example, has featured porn showcases since its inception in 2015. This year, the focus was on work created by Deaf and Disabled people within the queer community — showcasing films by the likes of Dr Loree Erickson , a winner at this year’s PorYes awards, and Wall of Fire , a short featuring self-described “bad ass, fat ass, Jew, dyke amputee” Nomy Lamm. SQIFF is a lesson in how this more communal mode of watching porn can help push the needle when it comes to diversity and representation. Rather than encouraging us to go further into the niche of our pre-established sexual interests, porn showcases encourage us to expand our porn repertoire beyond what we might already know and to reframe our viewing habits as part of a wider conversation.
Wall of Fire , directed and co-starring Nomy’s offscreen partner Lisa Ganser, is described as “an afternoon of tender making out and consensual amputee sex” in which “two fat bodied gender queer women, lovers off camera, push limits of pleasure, penetration & trust.” As you may be aware, it’s generally rare to find pornography that includes differently abled individuals except within the kind of fetish pornography that can veer towards sensationalism rather than authentic representation. As Dr Loree Erickson has explained, the act of being a differently abled person who makes and stars in pornography has the potential to rewrite the cultural script of who is deemed desirable: “Disability is often linked with undesirability, being unwanted. I wanted to explore disability as desirability. People with disabilities have always been hot and desirable, but I wanted to put it into the cultural sphere.”
Nomy was kind enough to speak to HUNGER about the importance of films like Wall of Fire and outlets like SQIFF . As they explain, their interest in showing work via platforms such as SQIFF is motivated by a combination of artistic and pragmatic reasons. “I’m interested in people with non-normative bodies and desires having platforms to share our art, which includes our sexuality. I’m also interested in disabled and fat sex workers being able to make a living.” They believe that change can only happen if differently abled people are both in front of and behind the camera — something that can only happen if individuals of all abilities support both their work and the independent festivals where they can showcase it. “I think who is doing the representing makes as much of a difference as who is being represented. When people with disabilities represent ourselves and each other as sexually powerful people with capacity to act on our own desires, it changes people’s perceptions of disabled people, and it changes our experience of reality,” they say. “Our bodies and stories are so often controlled by the imaginations of the people with the most access to resources; usually able-bodied white straight men. These stories almost by necessity end up abstracting us into fetishes and projections.”
It can be easy to dismiss the importance of representation given how this conversation has played out in mainstream culture, where it has amounted to a political sedative with no commitment towards radical change (we’re looking at you, Drag Race !). Yet porn is different. It’s our main discourse on desirability, something we all feed off and into, and it helps to underwrite the “bodies that matter” vis-a-vis the dominant paradigm. In this way, work by differently abled pornographers has the potential to radically change how able-bodied people view certain bodies: challenging not just stigma but also paternalism. But before this happens, we have to support grassroots and indie porn actors and film-makers like Nomy. “People should support independent pornography because it allows it to exist. If people don’t pay for it, people can’t afford to make it,” they say.
Showcases like the ones at SQIFF or BPFF feed into this by raising awareness, and helping creatives like Nomy gather interest in their work. “When people see these representations as options, they are able to realistically see whether that’s something they’re into and might want to see more of. Creating more visibility creates more of a market.”
You can follow Four Chambers on Instagram , Twitter and their official site. You can follow Nomy Lamm via their website
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