BERLIN — “Is it pornography or is it art?” Artists and filmmakers participating in the Porn Film Festival Berlin (PFFB) are no strangers to this question. Pushing back against rigid boundaries between erotic film and art, the annual six-day festival creates an inclusive, sex-positive space for exploring human desire.
This year, PFFB celebrated 20 years since its founding by filmmaker and producer Jürgen Brüning. Attendees of the opening night on Tuesday, October 21, packed Colosseum Filmtheater in Berlin’s residential Prenzlauer Berg.
“I produced porn in the ’90s and thought that the division between porn and art was stupid,” Brüning said as he received an award for his groundbreaking work running the independent, non-commercial festival. Wieland Speck, a filmmaker and the former head of Berlinale Panorama, spoke to the importance of Brüning’s vision as a producer and founder of alternative film spaces. Among the films Brüning has produced are No Skin Off My Ass (1991) by Canadian artist and queercore cinema pioneer Bruce La Bruce, which played in the Berlinale Panorama in 1996.
While Brüning often emphasizes that there are bad and good films in mainstream porn, challenging the stereotypical view of the industry as monolithically rotten, the festival has championed many alternative filmmakers and forms. Paulita Pappel, PFFB coordinator and founder of the independent pornographic production company Hardwerk (which had a dedicated film program in the festival this year), celebrated the event’s embrace of all kinds of films, reflecting feminist, LGBTQ+, kink, and gender-fluid communities. The festival is about “porn, of course, but also body politics,” Pappel said onstage on opening night.
The festival’s organizing team onstage during opening night, with Founder Jürgen Brüning third from left (photo Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
“Working at the festival really showed me that it’s possible to live in a society where people have a more ethical and joyful relationship to porn. It’s created a community that’s inspiring and energizing,” she later told Hyperallergic in an interview.
The festival’s mission to engage with social and political questions while cultivating a welcoming, playful environment is reflected in its programming. This year included not only films, but also workshops and talks on feminist porn, porn writing, lesbian fisting, deep throating, and other topics. Some events were hosted through its Adult Industry Forum, now in its fourth year, a two-day conference and networking event for industry professionals. Its key focuses range from ethical standards and sex education to marketing and social media strategies.
One of the festival’s throughlines is the strong protagonism of women in porn, not just as stars but as makers. “We have always supported each other,” the sexologist Laura Méritt said about Brüning and the festival to Hyperallergic. Together with Polly Fannlaf, Méritt co-founded the feminist pornography prize PorYes Feminist Porn Award in 2009.
Erika Lust was among the major industry figures in attendance at PFFB. The film producer, whose first shorts showed here in 2006, founded her own production company and platform for erotic cinema. She was the subject of a special program this year and produced the film Sorrow Bay (2022) by Casey Calvert, which was highlighted by the festival as a rare portrayal of the sexuality of women over age 60.
Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang is another festival stalwart. “It means so much to be here. You know, my movie I.K.U. (2000) was the opening film at the festival when it started in 2006,” she told Hyperallergic, noting that she has been returning ever since. Cheang said that she is currently in Berlin working on a new production. She also made a short film depicting the sexuality of older men; Brüning, who produced a number of her films, including Uki (2023), is one of the actors. At this year’s festival, she presented Wonders Wander (2017), a four-episode web serial celebrating the resistance of intergenerational queer communities and tracking sites of transphobic and homophobic violence on the outskirts of Madrid.
Left: Polly Fannlaf and Laura Méritt; right: Shu Lea Cheang on opening night (photo Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
PFFB plays a crucial role in connecting sex-positive, feminist, and LGBTQ+ communities across national borders, supporting filmmakers from countries whose governments suppress LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights or where violence against queer and trans people is rife. This year, the festival presented the Taiwan Porn Shorts section, with themes ranging from exploring sexuality while living with cerebral palsy to erotic futuristic fictions.
This year’s opening film, Fucktoys (2025), starring and directed by Annapurna Sriram, perfectly embodies the festival’s sense of joie de vivre. It tells the story of AP, a young sex worker in the American South whose life unravels after a psychic reveals that she’s cursed. When she’s fired as an exotic dancer, AP and her friend Danni (Sadie Scott) turn to risky acts, including taking on a client with a dangerous fetish for sharp objects. Despite this dire setting, the film is a rather buoyant satire on the “good girl” trope, mixing pathos with plenty of comedy and camp.
During a talk after the screening, Sriram said that she had grown up watching John Waters and thought she would make similar films. But she soon discovered that the industry wasn’t open to filmmakers and actors of color.
“I wanted to create representation for other Brown girls like me who are queer and slutty,” Sriram said. She added that she’s attuned to the fact that erotic cinema is particularly vulnerable to being stigmatized as inferior or obscene. “I always hate it when I’m called dirty. That always stings,” she said.
Bold, provocative, playful, and highly political, Fucktoys is the quintessential PFFB film. Still, Sriram said, it lacks wider distribution.
“We’re fucking around with fascism in America. They don’t want to see this kind of art being made,” Sriram told the audience. “Film companies are bending the knee to the Trump administration rather than fighting. That’s why communities really matter, getting off Instagram and showing up in person really matters.”
Festival Coordinator Paulita Pappel (left) and director Annapurna Sriram (right) (photo Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
The festival offers unconventional experiences for viewers to that end, experimenting with alternative forms of cinema-going. One of its beloved events, the Long Night of Lesbian Sex returned for a second year at Kino Moviemiento in Kreuzberg, showing films in two theaters simultaneously. The audience is encouraged to talk throughout and to leave, re-enter, and switch rooms whenever they like. Watching two films at once, in fragments, and mixing it up with drinks in the lounge, was highly liberating. It demystified erotic cinema as viewers commented on scenes out loud and cracked jokes. Equally liberating was experiencing erotic cinema as a communal enjoyment to be shared in real-time.
Blending earnest film culture with kink and fun extends to the festival’s choice of venues. Colosseum is a classic cinema whose red velvet curtains and proscenium stage are a throwback to pre-streaming grandeur; the closing party, meanwhile, was hosted by Klub Verboten (translating to “Forbidden Club”), a fetish-friendly club whose attendees are scrupulously vetted before becoming members or entering playrooms. In the past, PFFB has thrown parties in spaces such as Ficken 3000, a queer bar where the party roars upstairs, while the dark rooms downstairs are intended for intimate talk and play.
PFFB’s eclectic taste means championing westerns, horror, and B-movies as well as art films and animation. Crime movies are strong this year, as highlighted by the programmers. Documentary is also strongly represented, including films depicting sexual lives or reclaiming key figures in queer and sexual histories.
Still from A Body to Live In, directed by Angelo Madsen Minax, in which an elderly Musafar embraces Grin after their intimate suspension (image courtesy HARD FLOW)
In the first grouping, the titular protagonist in Denis Côté’s “Paul” (2025) runs an Instagram account called Cleaning to Save My Life, which he uses to meet dominant women to clean their homes in exchange for S/M sessions. Much like Sriram’s Fucktoys, the film depicts kinky cleaning routines in a casual, fresh way.
Meanwhile, Angelo Madsen’s visually immersive film A Body to Live In (2024) tells the story of the little-known body-piercing movement in 1970s California through the biography of its spiritual leader, Roland Loomis, also known as Fakir Musafar. Mixing testimonials from the movement’s participants with Musafar’s own telling and archival materials, including his television appearances, the film deeply engages the connection between physical pain and spiritual transcendence, while also querying its leader’s cultural appropriations of Indigenous and South Asian rituals.
Another notable hybrid film this year is Endless by Wojciech Puś. The filmmaker himself perfectly illustrates the porousness of boundaries between erotica and art, with his practice incorporating film, photography, installation, and virtual reality. In Endless, he stylistically juxtaposes his protagonists’ metaphysical reveries and confessions of deeply rooted malaise with scenes of sexual acts.
Still from Endless (2024), directed by Wojciech Puś (image courtesy Wojciech Puś)
The film plays like a ghost story, yet touches reality, presenting the existential angst of its trans and nonbinary cast, who together occupy dark apartment interiors in Warsaw and a luxurious mansion in Germany belonging to a queer art dealer. Puś challenges the narrowness of gender transition as a linear, time-bound, “before-and-after” experience. In his telling, this physical timeline bleeds into the afterlife, as if his characters were speaking from beyond the grave, establishing a much more expansive, consummate, darkly poetic imaginary.
Puś, who called PFFB “truly punk” in an email to Hyperallergic, first heard of the festival in 2023 from Rafał Żwirek, co-founder of the Post P_rn Arts Fest in Warsaw. Żwirek introduced him to Brüning, who then helped him navigate the festival world, including an international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
“I was super happy when [Brüning] invited Endless to screen at the Porn Film Festival Berlin, because I see this event as a significant, counter-culture platform, so needed these days,” Puś said. “In the face of growing fascism, nationalism, anti-queer movements, it feels like a needed harbor for the independent auteur cinema.”
