Tag Archives: Sensate Films

Petra Joy Award

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It’s official: we are award-winning feminist pornographers.  We’re dropping it casually in conversations, you betcha.  Heads turn.

Our short film Taken, a collaboration with our dear friend, wonderful lady, and cohort in smutmaking Viva, was selected for second prize in this year’s Petra Joy Awards.  In addition to a sweet trophy and some cashes, we will be included on Petra’s Her Porn Volume 4 collection, which is due to be released on DVD in Europe and the UK in 2013.  The Her Porn collections are nicely curated and contain both established and emerging filmmakers, and you should definitely check them out if you have the opportunity.  We’re pleased to be included in the latest edition; there are, like, famous people gon’ be on that DVD.  Score!  I don’t want to give away too much since that’s really Petra‘s business, but we’re pretty chuffed to be featured in the same place as some of our porno heroes.  I have had sneaky peeks at the other films selected for awards this year, and it’s pretty exciting to see that such a diverse range of pieces appealed to the judges. Through the awards, we also had the opportunity to connect with another Antipodean female pornographer who is just emerging, and am looking forward to collaborations with her.

Obviously I would say this, because she’s helping us out, but I do want to give some deep credence to Petra’s work, both behind the camera and in the industry of feminist pornographers.  She is absolutely sincere in her mission to assist emerging female erotic filmmakers to get their foot in the door in terms of distribution, collaboration, and community.  She understands the business elements of her market extremely well and is keen to spare other folks from exploitation by shitty distribution deals and the incredibly sharp pointy teeth of race-to-the-bottom porn publishing, and I think that’s perhaps more rare in this part of the industry that one might expect.  She was so welcoming to me when I visited the UK and generous with info, advice, free porn, and tea.  She has a lot of empathy for the folks she works with and is deeply concerned with the experiences of her performers and crew.  She’s also just generally bubbly and lovely and picked me up from the train station wearing a furry hat with ears and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses.  Does that paint the picture for you?

We’ve definitely got a lot of ideas flowing between us and it’s hard to keep track of them all, but hopefully there are one or two tricks up our skirts for 2013.  I think her work is worth watching for those who are looking for female-focussed mostly-hetero films, so please make yourself familiar with her catalogue and avail yourself of some of your money in the name of pioneering ladyporn.

Award-winning pornographers love duty-free whiskey.

Black Wolf, White Wolf and some Foxes.

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We are just about to launch our inagural project, and fuck we’re excited.  We can’t really talk about it until it’s all good to go, so in the meantime we’ll start filling you in on what we’ve been working on and what’s been passing before our lenses.

We’ve been testing our work on friends and colleagues and are getting such incredible responses.  One of them was from Melbourne artist and stylist Mel Balkan.  Check out her blog to get a sense of the breadth of her work.  Mel approached us with an idea that she seemed to have been developing for awhile.  And so we found ourselves a week later in an urban grunge setting making a film of a haircut.  Well, on the surface, anyway.  Mel’s approach to style is fully engaged and collaborative, and as we began to build moving imagery around the recontextualisation of her daily labour, we found a great many places in which to explore one of our favourite subjects: intimacy.  For two ladies who are used to filming much more conventionally vulnerable acts of sexual expression, we were pleased to find that we were able to find just as much vulnerability in this incredible exchange between the Black Wolf and the White Wolf.

Thanks to Belinda Gillies for the backstage images and Lady Lucille for the layers of White Wolf’s costume.  The edit is forthcoming over the next month or so, at which time we’ll say more about the piece itself, so stay tuned.  We were grateful for an opportunity to get out of the porno trenches for a moment and experiment with subject matter and form.  All told it was a beautiful afternoon of perfect light and generative feminine spirit, suggesting what might be possible as we open ourselves out into our community.