You Tell Me Why Not. (Director’s Statement)
I just got e-mail from our replication broker that the master and artwork files were received in good order. If all goes well, Ashley & Kisha should be on the truck by the end of next week.
With A&K done, this is the first time since the Spring of 2002 that I have not had a production breathing down my neck, the last few days have been the first few days spent thinking about how to promote Ashley & Kisha that I haven’t had lurking in the back of my mind that I have a movie I need to be working on. It feels strange and it feels unsettling, but it also feels good!
What I’m going to do with my new found freedom is lay seige to the film festival ciruit on behalf of Ashley & Kisha. The last time I did that was in 2002 with Marie & Jack, and it wasn’t very successful. Either the world wasn’t ready, or the film wasn’t good enough, or both, and Marie & Jack wasn’t accepted into a single festival I entered. (It did get invited into some festivals that year, and even picked up a few awards. Considering Marie & Jack has gone on to become a critically acclaimed best-seller, maybe it was that “world isn’t ready” thing.)
What ever the case, things have a little changed in the last five years. Porn may or may not be more mainstream than ever, but Comstock Films sure is, and the cinematic landscape has changed a little too.
Since 2001 (when Marie & Jack was shot) we’ve seen THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, SHORTBUS and even DESTRICTED, and while none of these films has really broken out of the arthouse world, they have (re)introduced the idea that sex has a place in the cinema. That sex – cunts, cocks, assholes, and jism – have a reality that is worthy of being “closely observed”, that there is something human, perhaps even uplifting in an orgasm.
The pleasure gap remains. The “intent to arouse” is still cited as the dividing line between “art” and “porn”, and a film made with the intent to arouse, and featuring explicit depictions of sexuality can still find itself on the wrong side of what I believe are wrong-headed ideas about sex.
But that same sort of film can also play at film festivals and win awards. Now days a film like that can get certified by the Motion Picture Association of America. Now days you can even buy a film like that a Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or even Blockbuster.
So I’m going to campaign the festival circuit and see if we can’t get a little of the right kind of attention for Ashley & Kisha, and part of what that means is a Director’s Statement. But as much as I like blabbering here, where I feel like I’m talking to my friends, that sort of “judge this film by my words, not by what you see on the screen” thing that director’s statements so often seem to be is just the sort of thing that gives me writer’s block.
But I got a little help from Kisha, and fought my way through, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound half bad.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT“Why am I this way? It needs no explanation. You saw the movie. You tell me why not.” – Kisha, from “Ashley and Kisha: Finding The Right Fit”
Those are Kisha’s last words in the film I’ve presented for your consideration. Kisha is talking about loving another woman, but after more than ten years of making these film, I’m not sure than anything I might say about why I need to make films about sex could put it any better. None the less, I will try.
In the course of these ten years I’ve visited with and witnessed many couples making love, and what has struck me is that whether a couple is younger or older; black or white or some shade in between; lesbian, gay, or straight; or practices familiar or more exotic acts; no matter any of these differences, there is a profound transcendence in the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure.
In witnessing this giving and receiving, in seeing desire writ large in faces both familiar and strange, I have seen myself. I have seen my own desire to please and be pleased, to pleasure and be pleasured, to love and be loved. And it is that seeing of one’s self that is, for me, the essential cinematic experience; that wonderful spark of recognition, that moment when the screen becomes a mirror for our own hopes and dreams. “Ashley and Kisha: Finding The Right Fit” is just such a mirror for me, and I hope it will be for you too.
Why do I make films about sex? Watch “Ashley and Kisha”, and you tell me why not!
