Brussels Porn Film Festival is a festival dedicated to alternative pornographies, sexual explicit representations that projects a diversity of fantasies, bodies and practices into the world. Born by the need to break with established norms, alternative pornography is a place where marginalised groups who are usually excluded from dominant representation find a powerful place of expression and reappropriation. Among those, sex workers, pillars of the pornographic industry and long dated social parias, occupy a crucial place. That’s why it seemed logical for our second edition to join forces with SNAP!, a festival dedicated to sex workers self representations.
The BxlPFF is the first and biggest porn film festival in Belgium, presenting a diverse program going from arthouse films to DIY projects fuelled with a political desire to showcase different approaches, practices and bodies to the most watched and produced film genre in the world.
The festival is mainly focused on short films, but also presents a selection of feature films, panel discussions, professional encounters, art exhibitions, parties and more!
/// 2023's THEME: RESISTANCES
For our next edition we are interested in imagining possibilities; whatever escapes oppression, whatever creates a difference, a touch, a changement of imposition. Something that… resists. How that resonates with you? Since its invention, audiovisual pornography lived in the margin of an ever evolving industry, showed at the very dark corners of society: brothels, XXX cinemas, the famous back rooms of video rental shops, midnight shows on tv, bars, pubs, darkrooms, bedrooms... The count goes on. The act of producing, acting, filming and watching pornography was and still is a taboo, covered in stigmas well glued in the bodies of those who dare to show their sexuality in a freely and explicit way. An artistic and cultural sector abolished from societal debate, appearing on the public agenda only when seen as a threat to a dominant morality. To produce alternative pornography is create a resistance and that’s why we ask ourselves: how are we going to continue to resist in an even more controlled world that constantly threatens our rights, bodies, identities, desires? What hope lies in our resistances? What hope laid on the ones that came before us and fought to express their sexualities in a freely and safe way, who allowed us to stay here and to project our own utopias of pleasure and desire? What place sex and sexuality have in that? And, finally, how the interconnection of multiple margins can form a mosaic Resistance to norm and oppression?
Therefore we understand “resistances” by a large spectrum: political resistances, resistance to legislative and digital censorship, of norms, reappropriation, to affirm sexualities as revolutionary weapons, subversive practices… You name it!
We have a particular interest in works created by and with persons with non-conforming bodies, racialized creators, queers, sex workers, and also works that showcases sexuality at older ages or that are performed with various functional diversities.
