A strange and eccentric German document Movies Counter

There are sex positive movies, and then there are My friend is a porn stara film about being as pro-sexual as possible without being an actual pornographic work. Star German director Rosa Friedrich keeps things on the watchable side of NC-17 in terms of clarity in this goofy but absolutely winning documentary about how she tried to make one kind of film and ended up making another.

The original idea was to record her friend Timo trying to fulfill his exhibitionist desire by getting Rosa to film him having sex with various women. But the two have different artistic visions. When he suddenly ghosted her in the middle of production and went AWOL, like so many frustrated women before her, she finished the project to her satisfaction. She achieved this in part by using very clear deepfake technology to graft an actor’s head onto Teemu’s body in shots she actually shot, so we could see the real Teemu from the neck down but with a pixelated box where the head of the actor she chose should have been. (It is not clear whose voice we will hear in the end, whether it is the actor’s voice or Timo’s voice.)

Plus, they get a very diverse group of women – including a dominatrix, a non-binary food porn maker, three polycule trans women, and many others – to make short films about what they find sexy. Overall, this makes for a nice, funny and interesting little show, which should be bookable for future festivals after its debut in Karlovy Vary.

Although the film skips over German-speaking countries like Germany and Austria while switching between different time frames, Friedrich manages to show how things went wrong and is therefore very relevant to the final product we see. I could be wrong, but almost at the beginning, it’s mentioned that Rosa and Timo were a heterosexual couple at one point, but now they’re just friends who are comfortable watching each other having sex with other people. Nest. At the very least, Timo likes watching porn and sex in general while Rosa isn’t into it herself. But Timo is excited about the idea of ​​people watching him, and feels that this is one way to get in touch with his feminine side, even though his intellectual justifications are constantly changing, just as he cannot commit to what he wants to do in the film.

Ultimately, Friedrich makes this evasion and self-questioning – not only of Timo but of others as well – an issue of how much we choose to reveal or hide ourselves. In the end, she probably succeeds in making a more interesting film than Timo seems to want to make, the latter of which for all intents and purposes seems like an exercise in narcissistic self-indulgence.

Anyway, before Timo took on the project, he shot some scenes with several of the women he and Friedrich had recruited for events like the Venus Show in Berlin, an “erotic and lifestyle” fair. Timo and Friedrich talk with Adriene Simonyan, a former opera singer who now produces porn, and is full of sensible advice. The pair travel to Hungary to meet Donna, a well-known porn actress, but she decides not to participate in the filming, for reasons that are not explained on camera but seem to have to do with the production’s lack of script and general professionalism.

Clips from the seven short films Friedrich ended up filming along with some of the people she met in the process, exploring what personally interested them, are regularly included in Timo’s sections. Some shots are grainy vanilla, others are more fruity — exactly in the case of non-binary participant Alice Eric Bigcleet, who enters a bathtub naked and has slices of fruit and whipped cream arranged exquisitely on her body.

The full range of sexuality is discussed, if not fully shown, from BDSM to play with various objects to water sports and the like, but with a lot of attention to why it all becomes topics, with an emphasis on psychology more than anatomy. In the end, they show the short film package at the Erotic Film Festival, and Friedrich catches her crew’s faces as they watch the films, happy to see themselves. It’s that joy that makes this film so fun and weird, along with the natural comedic timing of Friedrich and editor Melanie Schmidt.