Jasmin Hagendorfer

Creative Director of Porn Film Festival Vienna

Porn. Available at the touch of a button and if you have been around on the internet, chances are high that you have at least stumbled across it, or perhaps even watch it regularly. Yet, outside of some academic settings, there is a distinct lack of public spaces where pornography can be watched, discussed, critiqued, understood as a social phenomena – and even used as a tool to advocate for and celebrate sexual freedom and diversity in all of its variations.

For a long time, mainstream porn has had little to do with authentic sexuality. In the best case, it is a high-performance sport and in the worst case, inhuman and exploitive. As such, what is the solution? In the words of feminist sex-educator and theorist, Annie Sprinkle, “The answer to bad porn isn’t no porn… it’s to try and make better porn!”

During the years 2014 – 2016, Transition Queer Minorities Film Festival Vienna in cooperation with Pornfilmfestival Berlin, hosted porn screenings that were sold-out every evening. The message received was clear, there is a growing demand for explicit sex that actually empowers individuals to make their own decisions and choices free of social stigma. The Porn Film Festival Vienna was born – as an effort to actively challenge narrow definitions of porn, value it as an art form that is able to question the structures that limit sexual expression and have a lot of fucking fun doing it! 

The Porn Film Festival Vienna blurs the lines between art and sex – to promote the kind of filmmaking unlike anything that most of us have seen before, the kind that challenges perceptions to the question: “What is Porn?”

http://pornfilmfestivalvienna.at/