Reinventing Porn: Erika’s Ethics

With: Erika Lust, moderated by Maike Mia Höhne
Topics: #Directing #Erotic #Change #Collaborative Working #feminism #Diversity #Gender Equality #Production Conditions (...)

How and why did Erika pick up a camera? Sex-positive director Erika Lust (XConfessions) analyses the androcentric space of porn and mass media and its representation of sex, sexuality and women built by the male gaze and its ideals. For her, change occurs in the production process, meaning that what happens in front of the camera has everything to do with the people behind it. In the company of Berlinale Shorts Curator Maike Mia Höhne, she discusses how this principle affects everything from the storyline, to the way pleasure, gender roles and agency are represented and how collaborators work on set. Yet Erika’s production ethics are by no means restricted to the domain of porn and she sets out to ask questions about the place of social responsibility in the wider medium of filmmaking.

Maike Mia Höhne

Maike Mia Höhne is a filmmaker, curator, mother. From 2007 to 2019 she was the curator and head of Berlinale Shorts. Now she is the artistic director the Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg. She works as a curator and jury member for film funds and festivals around the world. As a professor of film, she teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Europe in Hamburg. Her curatorial focus is on politics, sex and feminism.

Erika Lust

Erika Lust is an acclaimed indie adult filmmaker. In 2015, she gave a TEDx talk called “It’s Time for Porn to Change.” Her XConfessions project is the world’s first crowd-sourced erotic film series. Every month, she picks two anonymous fantasies shared on XConfessions.com and turns them into explicit shorts. With more than 150 short films, she also produces and finances female guest directors from across the globe and believes in having women in all key positions behind the camera.