Berlin Porn Film Festival Diary

[If you have a Flickr account, you can check out all 63 of the pics I took here]

Day 1
After feeling seriously screwed up from flying into Berlin on a red eye from New York, my boyfriend and I slept a few hours, showered, and met up with a few of our porny cohorts, including one of my longtime friends in the industry Joe Gallant, a fellow New Yorker whose films “Ave. X” and “Atomic Skull Fuck Orgy” are playing in the festival, and Mouse, a performance artist from London. Mouse was sporting a giant black eye, and introduced herself by saying, “I’m not a junky, I swear!” Over a lunch of curried sausages and other meats all smothered in what looked like the same sauce, we discussed the ins and outs of having a profession that involves one’s own and other people’s orifices. It turns out that we’d be seeing a lot more of Mouse’s orifices at the festival’s opening night party.

After a civilized champagne cocktail reception and the opening screenings at the Kant Kino – where we giggled over the correct pronunciation of Kant: though we say “caan’t” it’s more like “cuunt” – it was off to the Lux Nachtbar, where many of the after parties for the festival will be taking place.

The featured performer for the evening was Mouse, our effervescent lunch companion, who came out on stage dressed as a pink poodle, wig and all. She promptly squatted on the stage and pulled a bib out of her vagina that read “dirty dog.” She got much messier from there, anally fisting herself, giving herself on stage douches and enemas, sitting in dog food, and sliding around in the big mess (which is, incidentally, how she got her black eye this past weekend).

Afterwards, while taking a quiet moment with the still unclothed Mouse, I asked her what she does to warm up for her performances. She laughed and shook her almost-empty highball glass at me.

Day 2
Gone are the days when you could don a raincoat and stroll down to your local smut theater, tiptoe across a floor sticky with jism and enjoy a wank in the company of strangers while watching the ole in-out on the silver screen. Enter the porn festival, a rare opportunity to sit in a public theater with strangers and check out some onscreen fucking!

Upon arriving at the Berlin Porn Film Festival, I wondered: would people sit politely with their hands folded in their lap and their belts firmly buckled, or would the audience become an orgy of flesh and soft sucking sounds?

The first screening I went to was for The Bi Apple, which was making its German debut. I sat in the back of the theater, partly because I wanted to monitor the action in the crowd, and partly because I arrived extremely late due to circumstances entirely within my control. Having seen the film in pieces and in its entirety approximately ten thousand times, I turned my attention to the audience and their reactions. As the film progressed, people slumped down in their chairs a bit more, perhaps having a go at themselves, but generally everyone sat stock still facing front.

Everyone, that is, except the couple sitting directly in front of me. By the second scene they were pulling their shirts up over their heads and making out with loud sounds of lip smacking, plus whispering sweet nothings to each other in German. I like to think they were saying things like: “This is the hottest porno ever! Audacia Ray truly is a genius!” but chances are better that they were discussing the throb of their various nether regions. The dude sitting to their right, however, was not amused. He whispered furiously to them in German, the lady half of the pair said nasty things back to him, and eventually the couple gathered up their discarded clothing and left in a huff.

Apparently, it isn’t acceptable by German standards to get amorous while enjoying the specter of films at a porn festival. We’ll see if these societal standards of decorum erode over the next few days.

Day 3
After a bit of exploration during the day, which included such wholesome activities as a visit to Cupcake Shop Berlin and a stroll around unpronounceable neighborhoods, I made my way to the Kant Kino to check out the International Short Film Competition (or Internationaler Kurzfilmwettbewerb for the German speakers among us). Jürgen Brüning, one of the festival’s organizers, explained that in last year’s festival, they separated the films into the categories of straight, gay, lesbian and fetish, but this year they decided to put them all together because it makes things a lot more interesting.

Although the program was described as being hardcore, most of the films were a lot more arty than your standard porn flick. Sure, they were hardcore in that they all showed images of genitals (though not always excited ones), but they weren’t your basic, stripped down fuck films. If I saw the first film, “Balloon Sex Balloon,” online it would look like your average messy balloon and foot fetish girl-girl scene, but in a movie theater, the film seemed much more like art. Another film, “Dinner for a Cocksucker” also showed pictures of yummy looking cocks, but it wasn’t what I’d call porno. As it turned out, this first few films were a bit of a slow warm up for what was to come.

About halfway through the program was Joe Gallant’s aforementioned “Atomic Skull Fuck Orgy,” shot in his typical gritty, intense, urban apocalypse style. Within the first few minutes the main character, a publicist played by Annie Cruz, was squatting in an alley full of plastic sheeting, excreting the contents of her bowels, giving and receiving milk enemas, getting and giving fuckery, and other fun. I’ve seen Joe’s movies before, but seeing this on the big screen – wow. There are no words. The film definitely got a rise out of the audience, who was giggling away in discomfort.

The most beautifully produced film was “This is the Girl,” a lesbian fetish film that was beautifully shot and lit and featured the director, Catherine Corringer, as the main character. In the film, she used edgy-looking fetish aesthetics to produce images of sexual alienation and connection. The film ended with a grand finale of a beautiful and up-close female ejaculation scene (which the director said is called “le fount femme” in her native French). The main character then shadow boxes throughout the end credits.

To me, the most fascinating thing about the short films was the ways that the films differed stylistically from mainstream American porn. At the same time, I was struck by the fact that really, no matter who is doing it, sex is sex is sex. The shape and size of bodies may differ, but people in all kinds of sexual situations make the same kind of faces, and no matter what language they speak, all moans sound the same.

Day 4
There are a lot of things that are amazingly progressive and laid back about European attitudes towards sexuality and bodies – for example, there’s casual nudity everywhere, from the beaches to the weather forecasts. I’ve always assumed that Americans were majorly prudish and backwards in comparison to the enlightened Europeans, but this turns out not to be so true, especially when it comes to female sexuality and porn.

On Saturday I was on a panel called “Good Porn for Good Girls” with five other female porn directors, Erika Lust (Barcelona), Julia Ostertag (Berlin) [who my BF and I affectionately refer to as "German Vendetta" due to her aesthetic and philosophical similarities to Bella Vendetta], Ovidie (Paris), and Petra Joy (Brighton). During the course of the conversation and the audience Q&A, it became clear that the US and Europe have gone in really different directions with respect the idea of women watching and enjoying porn and other adult material. In the United States, the result of the sex wars in the 1980s was a surge of porn produced and directed by women, furthermore there are many online and brick and mortar sex shops that now cater to women and couples. In much of Europe, however, the result of the sex wars was that women became more limited in their options for sexual exploration and porn-viewing. Things have crawled along in the past 20-odd years: there aren’t really any female friendly sex shops, in Germany it’s illegal to buy porn DVDs online (where many women shop), in the United Kingdom stores have to be licensed to sell porn, and independent and female producers have hard time getting their work distributed.

The American porn industry is amazingly influential in good and bad ways, and most of the women on the panel spoke of their attempt to make images that counter the mainstream, crummy, male-centered stuff being made in the United States. At the same time, the directors on the panel were envious of the distribution and support networks available in the US. And while in the US it seems to be generally accepted that women watch porn and enjoy a wide variety of screen action, judging by a lot of the audience questions, it seems like Europeans are pretty unconvinced that women are interested in seeing hardcore sex on screen. I guess all cultures have their hang ups.

Day 5
Saturday evening through Monday morning are a big of a smear, due to the booze, general sleeplessness, and the time change (in Europe, but not stateside). After the panel and a bit of schmoozing, my BF and I grabbed a cab and headed out to meet the proprietors of Cupcake Shop Berlin, who are friends-of-friends, for a meal and a psychobilly show at a club called Wild at Heart. Berlin is apparently the epicenter of the psychobilly scene, and the fact that the night was also a Halloween party at the club allowed us to make lots of jokes about whether or not people were wearing costumes.

After a three hour dinner (I love that the waitstaff in Europe never pushes people to turn a table over), we checked out the psychobilly show and then started with the club hopping with the general goal of making it to Lux for the perpetual festival afterparty. In between we popped into a ridiculously overblown club with a long line outside – VIP, baby, Ms. Ray does not wait in lines – and we checked out the last remaining strip of the Berlin Wall, where I thought it would be appropriate to expose my boobs.

On Sunday, after a bizarro thing where I thought I was 10 minutes late to the screening of The Bi Apple but actually was 50 minutes early due to daylight savings, I did the Q&A thing (Q: “what is the philosophical statement you are making with this film?” A: “you should enjoy the spectacle of sexualities and masturbate”), and we checked out the awards for the Short Film Competition. I got misty-eyed (really) when “Atomic Skull Fuck Orgy” was given first place. I’ve known Joe Gallant a long time and it’s great to see him get recognition. We spent much of the rest of the night discussing cool collaborative ideas that hopefully we’ll roll out in the next few months. At the final party of the event, I did a lot of shouting over music and exchanging of ideas. It was pretty spectacular, and I do feel like I found my inspirado (as my charming boyfriend puts it) in Berlin. Now I just have to focus and turn it into some good stuff.