Porn Film Festival

PORN FILM FESTIVAL

Once in Paris, around 1997, Marie Helen Bourcie (now Sam Bourcie, writer and professor of gender studies) took me to a small movie theater with English subtitles, and we watched a Bruce LaBruce film, Hustler White. I was thrilled.

Several years later in a gay shop in Berlin I discovered that he had recently released a new film and I immediately bought it.

When I watched it I loved it like crazy and decided that I wanted to show it in Athens, so I emailed him and he replied immediately. As luck would have it, his producer lived in Berlin, so I went to meet him. That’s how my friendship with Jurgen Bruning began. Producer of Bruce and owner of the gay porn company KazzoFilm and later of WurstFilm.

I brought them, Jurgen and Bruce, to Athens (2005), screened the film with great success and a few months later with Jurgen’s help (he did the programming) I organized the Gay & Lesbian Pornographic Art Film Festival. There, I also brought Maria Beatty whose work I admired.

There was a queue as long as three city blocks and Jurgen exclaimed, “If you can do this in Athens I can do it in Berlin,” and we agreed that next year he would start it in Berlin and I would bring it to Athens which is what happened.

In 2007, with the help of Nikos Triantafyllidis (owner of the Gagarin club), I started the Berlin Porn Film Festival in Athens for a few years.