On the weekend of August 18 to 20, I attended my first erotic film festival hosted by the Kinky Collective, titled, Erotic Edge – A Celebration of Kink, Queerness, and Cinema.
The experience of watching adult cinema collectively, in a dark theatre, with a mix of colleagues from work, and complete strangers, was jarring to begin with. At the first few instances of watching prolonged scenes of physical intimacy in close quarters, I held my breath and froze in my seat. I soon realised that I needed to overcome the internalised self-consciousness of being discovered I feel while watching sexual media in private.
In the slow trust I offered the space, I witnessed its unabashed capacity, especially in the discussions that followed the films. Here, visual erotica found a unique purpose, of vulnerability, introspection, and community-building.
Spectators shared that the consumption of pornography, and its utility, usually encourages one to consume large amounts of content, at a quickened pace, to arrive at the suitable array of images; for a rhythmic anticipation towards orgasm. Here, whereas the sensuality of erotica remained, the deliberate turning on of lights, demanded an inversion of one’s interior self to this public.
Whereas a plethora of experimental, documentary, and educational films, peaked my unwavering attention, during some screenings, my mind wandered away, distracted. Regardless of my state while watching these films, they demanded witnessing, at their own pace, on their own terms. I thought, for a space built around kink, this was the ultimate exercise in submission. My back ached, my throat became dry, but I sat, every day, for three days on my seat, watching. For extended periods, when my gaze was arrested on the screen, I learnt to remind myself to let loose, breathe, shift my posture, crack my back and take a sip of water.
For someone like myself, an amateur kinkster, films offered surprising moments of arousal, in sharing a breadth of sexual acts and relationships that minimised normative, peno-vaginal sex. Vignettes of tenderness in these relationships felt like warm invitations that made me intermittently message my partner about all the exciting possibilities of sexual and romantic expression we could weave into our lives. In the film Breathtaking (directed by Morgana Muses), a couple indulged in tender breathplay, where the dominatrix led the submissive to luxuriate in their attentive care. In Spellbound (directed by Ulrike Kaffei) a couple, crouching like tigers, dressed in black, tattooed extensively, found themselves involved in a choreography of rope-play.
The dominatrix entangled their submissive in an intricate spider-web of bright red rope, a hypnotic sight. The rope that suspended and rendered the submissive immobile, transformed into a blanket to engulf the two in a moment of emotive aftercare. In the curiosity of playing with breath and ropes, I wondered about my own anxieties surrounding claustrophobia and constriction. After a panicked experience of breathlessness during a diving trip, I remembered the trust I instilled in my partner who held my hand, and slowly led me into the ocean again. Over time, I learned to float in the ocean, first with the support of his arms, and then, by breathing deeply with the ocean’s waves slowly lapping me up in a rhythmic trance. Watching the transcendent submissives, I was reminded of my own reintroduction to the ocean, where I allowed myself to overcome fear and enter a meditative state by trusting my partner and the expansive capacity of my body.
A Mes Amours, directed by Anoushka.
Apart from the catharsis in these films, I felt sheer joy in expressions of queer love, of diverse bodies moving, shaking, thumping against one another. Some in the audience shared an ache and longing for such spaces of celebration, while others felt emboldened to imagine utopian futures replete with joyous promise. While watching The Debauchary Ball (directed by David Weathersby) on Chicago’s annual underground ceremony of Black kinky sexuality and House music, I couldn’t stop moving in my seat to the electrifying beats. The juxtaposition and multi-sensorial joy of music matching the colour and candour of gyrating bodies, was also captivating in the film Vivante (directed by Anoushka).
Several films shared the laughter, chaos, and the frolic that sex truly reveals, in between positions and moments of seduction and pursuit. In A Weekend in Germany (directed by Jan Soldat), two men in their 70s, live a relaxed life of kink, where naps in their garden are followed by a play of flogging, spanking and video-archiving their sexual encounters. The two cajole each other like high-school boys, tugging on each other’s bodies, teasing each other through their day. In MILF Next Door (directed by Sadie Lune) and My Garage My Rules (directed by Manon Praline), the plot invoked the classic trope of porn films, where a sexual encounter between two individuals is facilitated through a false pretext; a jar of sugar from the next-door neighbour, a broken car awaiting repair at a garage. Both these tongue-in-cheek premises were however, inverted in the films with a non-normative cast and moments of unpretentious, unrehearsed respite.
In the ecstasy of watching these films, it was sobering to ponder on the discomforts of kink; the ambiguities around relationships, and the messiness it entails, when gone awry.
In At Least I’ve Been Outside (directed by Jan Soldat), the filmmaker shares a comedic screen recording of persons on a dating app, rejecting his request of filming them solo. A jilted lover, navigates marriage in Saint and Whore (directed by Anne Berchad) through sacrifice and endurance, but confronts and wreaks havoc in House for Sale (directed by Eisha Marjara). In these films, complex intersections of gender, power, and consent provided fascinating conversation among the attendees, who shared a wide range of contradictory thoughts.
On two occasions, kink educator Ancilla facilitated classes on Erotic Expressionism and Erotic Communication, creating an opportunity for the sex education class, I had not received and didn’t know needed. The introspective questions in the seminar provoked me to think about the formative interiors of my erotic self, and brought to my consciousness memories and glimmers of sensuality from the past. In sharing experiences of the self with the cohort, instances of fondness, betrayal, the complicity of the self, came to the fore. The reflexivity of the attendees offered an opportunity to participate in what felt like group therapy, akin to anonymous support groups that I have observed in films and television before. The classes offered thought into non-genital, non-sexual eroticism, such as the sartorial choices of sexual aestheticism. I thought about my love for the sari, a garment held together by the constriction of the petticoat, whose tight knot around my waist stimulates, and relieves, with its untying at the end of the day.
The very location of the festival at Akshara Theatre in Delhi amused me. The venue has been a site of cultural memory, where I have grown up watching plays with my parents, which now carries a re-inscribed meaning. At the end, the word ‘edge,’ in the naming of the festival, made me think about ‘edging’, or the prolonged restraining of climax, which truly was the experience of watching these films. In the safety and warmth of a community, a dark theatre transformed into a space for vulnerability, openness, and sharing, morning to evening for three days.
Kali is a researcher, writer and teacher interested in legal critique, queerness, and art. Their anonymity arises from the stigma and shame around topics discussed in this piece. They dream about being loud and proud one day! Kali volunteers with the Kinky Collective, an activist group which seeks to raise social awareness about kink and to strengthen the Indian BDSM community, which can be contacted at thekinkygroup@gmail.com.
