The London Porn Film Festival is the best of all possible worlds — a smart and engaged film-loving programming staff who also care deeply about the future of porn and helping porn fulfills its potential to do good in the world.
I’ll either be going to LPFF for fun or to help out in some way, but I highly recommend it. Not least because I met two of their film programmers this year, Rude Jude and Max Disgrace, and they are the bomb.
Plus, their special guest this year is non other than Pandora/Blake. They are a good friend of mine who make great porn and are also a tireless advocate for more ethical UK rules around porn and age verification. It’s worth going just to see Pandora/Blake.
A statement from the organizers:
OUR STATEMENT
The London Porn Film Festival is a new space for people who want to celebrate their sexuality on screen. We welcome filmmakers of every kind, who are exploring sex in all its incarnations. As queer organisers actively challenging narrow definitions of porn, we take our inspiration from the Berlin Porn Film Festival, which has fostered a dynamic space for sex workers, porn performers, porn producers and other creatives to challenge and explore our understanding and enjoyment of sex. And, after several years of sell-out porn screenings at the Wotever DIY Film Festival, the time is right for London to have its own festival and to maintain a strong resistance against the insidious conservative agenda that polices some bodies (and not others) and enforces a sterile, unreflective and often misogynistic notion of what constitutes healthy relationships, love and fucking.
We value porn as an art form that is able to question and challenge the power structures that limit our sexual expression. Radical queer porn has not settled as an art form – it straddles the borders of visual art, performance art, erotica, political activism and many other genres – making it a unique vehicle for presenting new and radical ideas of sexuality. Beyond that, it can influence and re-shape our notions of politics and society. London Porn Film Festival exists as a place to re-learn our notion of porn; to explore, re-imagine, embrace and re-consider the boundaries of filmmaking itself – where sex and filmmaking meet without borders.
We endorse a festival that is wilder, bigger, better (wetter!) and more creative. The time is right – let’s do this!
Photo: Neurosex Pornoia 3