Volunteers Wanted (or How to Live, Love and Fuck at the Berlin Porn Film Festival) is, unsurprisingly, the perfect movie to close out a porn film festival. A hyper-meta, half-fiction/half-documentary celebration of the festival experience, the film combines a love story, gorgeous sex, behind-the-scenes footage, and interviews to recreate the sense of freedom and possibility that makes these events so unique.
Ron Rex’s film opens with a handheld black and white film camera moving through the hubbub of a porn shoot set up—weaving around camera crews, directors, costume and make up people—before composing the perfect shot of performers Jiz Lee and Kali Sudra. This shot demonstrates the film’s central message: porn, especially non-mainstream porn, is full of people of all kinds coming together to create. The finished product is just one part of a collective endeavour that is driven forward by those who truly believe in the art they are making.
Among this collective are Kali and her love interest Finn Peaks—a performer she has met online, but not yet in person. Their adorable interaction forms a loose framework for the film, but the movie is about more than this love story. When they first see each other across a crowded room, it’s a room full of creators from all over the world. Interviews with these creators, writers, and fans pepper the film with expressions of love for the festival experience – the connections, the opportunities, the parties, the pride, the self-expression, and the passion projects they can make together while they’re there.
At one point we join Jiz, Kali, and a crew as they get ready for a shoot, experimenting with different shots, discussing boundaries, choosing costumes. When the movie then transitions to the resulting seductive, switchy, BDSM scene, it’s all the hotter because we have an insight into their existing friendship, their comfort with one another, the excitement everyone involved feels for the project. Diverse, queer people connect, try new things, and party like everyone’s watching and they love it. If you’ve never been to a porn film festival, it’ll make you want to go ASAP. If you have, it’s an emotional reminder of the community spirit that makes these events so unique.
However, it’s not all parties. When Kali and Finn do eventually go on a date, they find the freedom to be honest with one another, discussing the problems that arise for sex workers when dating civilians and how hard it is for sex workers to find partners that embrace them. As Finn says, “We have our peers, our support network.”
Finn and Kali’s final beautiful love scene is a testament to that feeling. As they say goodbye to each other at the end of the festival, it’s sad. Yet, it’s also uplifting knowing there’s a place where sex workers, artists, fans and supporters—who so often create or consume porn alone, living outside of convention—can be totally wholly, and unashamedly themselves. As SFPFF’s online program ended, this was the perfect way to keep us all hopeful and inspired.
Volunteers Wanted is available on Xconfessions.
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