A porn film festival in times of the corona virus – is that even possible? Since March we have been asking ourselves this question, and it quickly became clear to us: The festival can’t take place the same way it has been up to now, as a glittering party with hundreds of films and thousands of visitors. Shouldn’t we just skip it altogether and hope for a better year in 2021? Our answer to this question is decisive: No! Because as important as care and consideration are in this weird corona year, we also take another task of this time seriously: bringing people together again, to events, in the public space. Because shuttering all cultural events and giving up public life is also making people sick.
Therefore we decided to organize a festival in the cinema space, based on the current rules of reduced audiences, distance and hygiene, even though we can only offer a few tickets. We know that we will miss the packed theaters and the exuberant atmosphere of the last festival years as much as you. Since the number of visitors in our festival cinemas Kino Moviemento and Babylon Kreuzberg is quite limited due to local health regulations, for the first time we will offer part of our program via online streaming – in the week after the festival and in cooperation with our friends from PinkLabel.TV. The festival pass for the online program can be purchased from October 1st to 25th 2020, and the films can be watched for one week after the festival – from October 26th to November 1st 2020 – on PinkLabel.TV.
Our retrospective “A Virus Knows No Morals – The AIDS Era in Cinema” looks back in time to the 1980s and 90s, but it is nevertheless highly topical. During the first weeks of the shutdown, while (re-)watching films that were made during the AIDS pandemic of the 20th century, we realized many parallels to the present situation of the corona year 2020: the terminologies and imagery have been infused with a new timeliness and the same discourse mechanisms are repeated. Autumn 2020 is the right time to watch the angry satires, the activist documentaries and the poignant melodramas of the AIDS era again – they do not offer simple answers or solutions to the questions and conflicts of the present, but they provide us with moments of déjà vu as well as a few warnings.
This year’s reduced program presents nine feature films and six short film programs during the festival week. However, in view of the many great films that were entered for this edition, we did not want to resign ourselves to this curatorial restriction and decided instead to turn the festival week into a festival year. The rest of our retrospective program can be seen throughout November in weekly screenings at Kino Moviemento. And a monthly series of Pornfilmfestival short film programs will run from December 2020 to September 2021 throughout the coming year, until next autumn, when the Pornfilmfestival 2021 will be just around the corner, and which we hope to celebrate with you again under the usual conditions.
Until then: stay healthy, stay mindful – and visit cinemas, so that they will still exist next year!
Jochen Werner
Curator Pornfilmfestival Berlin
