By GiA G
The Berlin Porn Film Festival annually showcases a vast array of short porn films from around the world. It features fetish porn shorts, queer porn shorts, the more the merrier (aka orgies) and even a selection of heterosexual short porn movies. While porn and sexuality are inherently political, this year’s festival included a special section called “Sex and Politics Shorts.” This curated selection highlighted a range of political issues intertwined with sexuality, sex work, the environment, and society, exploring how these elements interact with and influence each other.
In Fuck You Pay Me, directed by Mercy St. James and featuring GiA G, Vivi Stone, and others, the current situation surrounding Amsterdam’s Erotic Center is humorously depicted. Two window workers, a dom and their sub, destroy a cake representing the “Erotic Prison,” as it’s called in the film, by sitting on it and feeding it to the sub. The film was shot in squatted windows in the Sint- Annenkwartier in Amsterdam, which was endearingly called the whorehouse and functioned as an organising space and second home to sex workers in the city for about a month until it was destroyed by the municipality.
Another film, Pe ataju jumali (Hot Air), critiques the environmental crisis and how rich Western companies continue their colonial attitudes towards climate change. It highlights how Indigenous peoples and their lands continue to be destroyed, their expertise ignored, and how multi-billion companies try to claim they’re “lending a helping hand”. One of the lines that ended the movie said something along the lines of this: “You want clean air? Make it yourself. Stop pretending to do good when you keep destroying the world.”
Dori Dori, a video clip, explores lesbian Arab identity and the love of eating pussy. Plenum in Tuntenhaus (Plenum in the Faggot House), part of a larger project by Lasse Langtorm, shows a funny meeting about gentrification and toxic masculinity within the gay community.
These films urgently address necessary issues, beautifully translating them to the screen with humour, care, and critique. One film stands out as particularly relevant to our current political climate.
Mythical Creatures, by Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, focuses on the Argaman Alliance—an organization of Israeli and Palestinian sex workers—and one of their first actions in 2019. Shot in Berlin by a sex worker from the region, it follows the group’s response to a movie theatre screening a film about sex work without inviting actual sex workers to participate in the panel talk after.
This film illustrates a persistent global issue: sex workers are often get the last seat at the table in conversations about their rights, health, and work environments. Its relevance is heightened by the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The filmmaker shared that sex workers continue to work, organize, and fight for their rights amidst the war raging above, beneath and beyond them.
Mythical Creatures underscores the need for global dialogue between organizations, an end to unnecessary conflicts, the importance of pornography in cinema, sex worker rights, and coming together to discuss and challenge each other’s perspectives.
Predictably, a lone cis white man in the audience questioned, “This war is “controversial” and all, but genocide?” The immediate reaction from the entire audience, including the panel and filmmakers, effectively silenced him. It begs the question: Why attend a screening on sex and politics if one’s views are so misaligned with the realities that are blatantly presented?
This is why these movies are so important. We need more conversations, more porn, more platforms for sex workers to share their stories, and more screen time for anti-capitalist, decolonial, and queer voices in cinema. We require more funding, more theatres opening their doors, and more time to showcase the stories that have always existed, and will always exist, regardless of the continuous efforts to silence and suppress us.