Comedy, pathos and lots of naked, dangly bits!

A stand-out at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, we've got our eyes on The Auteur, the sweet and raucous story of Arturo Domingo, the one-time leading director of art-porn cinema (Five Easy Nieces, Requiem for a Wet Dream, Full Metal Jack-Off), who finds himself at an all-time low in both career and romance.

The movie is a perfect fit for CineKink and we'll naturally be looking to include it in our next fest. But that's still a ways off - approximately 291 days as of right now, but who's counting? - and we'd love for it to find the audience it deserves in the meantime.

And you can help! Currently in the running for a slot in From Here to Awesome, a new festival that strives to cut through a lot of distribution mumbo-jumbo and make films more widely and directly available, you can take a gander at the submission trailer for The Auteur below and then make your desires known right here:



(It plays a much larger role in the actual movie, but watch for a few cameo appearances of the Clinton Street Theater, past and possibly future home to CineKink: PDX!)

Too hot for Dallas!

The perennial crowd-pleaser and CineKink award winner, Filthy Food, has run into another flap of controversy, this time at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival.

According to director T. Arthur Cottam, the trailer for the film was prevented from being posted to the event's website for fear of offending AFI Dallas sponsors and the already printed cover for Day 3 of the festival's newspaper was ordered destroyed and replaced because it prominently featured an image (above!) from the film. (A bootleg copy of the original cover has been posted to the Dirty Little Shorts Yahoo Group.)

But an interview with T. - and a red carpet photo with a giant banana - did make its way into Day 11 of the AFI Dallas Daily News and touches upon controversies past and present. From the intro:

A nectarine, a banana, cookie dough – all banned. All forbidden to be shown onscreen at a film festival in Italy because they apparently would end civil society as we know it (or at least, as the Italians know it). That is the talent of T. Arthur Cottam and his film, FILTHY FOOD, in a nutshell. By the sheer weight of his presentation, he made some fruit and some dough naughty. More than naughty – disgusting, even.

Judge for yourself. You can watch the trailer, below. Or visit Atom Films to watch the smutty masterpiece in its glorious entirety!

A fight to the finish

The fifteenth and final New York Underground Film Festival kicked off last night and continues through April 8th at Anthology Film Archives.

In a comprehensive profile on indieWire about the changing landscape of underground festivals in the US, organizers point to new distribution technologies that make many of the works they showcase more readily accessible - a consideration also looming for kinky film festivals, no doubt. But they also question the nebulous definition of the genre itself:

"What is 'underground' film anyway?" wondered Ed Halter, the former director of NYUFF and one of this year's special curators. "The term 'underground' is problematic because most people are under the misconception that 'underground, is synonymous with 'shock' cinema."

In the comments to the article, filmmaker Ralph Ackerman puts the query in to some historical perspective:

I started making experimental films in 1963 and at that time we called it underground cinema because if we showed our films in the public we were always arrested for being obscene etc... Things are so mild now. Kenneth Anger with his trangressive films faced the coops (sic) often."

With that, our best wishes to NYUFF organizers in their new venture, Migrating Forms - and just one of the NYUFF '08 trailers, a retro-flavored, hair-pulling rendition commissioned from Peggy Ahwesh.

Are you ready?

More info - and much more - coming soon!