It’s four in the morning here and I just finished a long chat with a representative of the OFLC.

“Ashley and Kisha” has not been classified, which meant that the OFLC could have given it a festival exemption to play at MUFF.

But OFLC refused to give it a festival exemption on the basis that my previous three films were classified X.

I asked why Destricted, which features work by Larry Clark, who’s previous film was refused classification, was given a festival exemption to play the same night as Ashley and Kisha, across town at ACMI, a and they could not answer.

I asked why Destricted, which features brutally mercenary depictions of the most loveless anal sex, was given a festival exemption and they could not answer.

Their suggestion was that we submit “Ashley and Kisha” for rush classification, in the hopes that we would receive a R classification.

But…

When I asked why 9 Songs, which feature actors performing cunelingus, felatio, ejaculation, and penetration was given an R, while our films which depict actual lovers are given an X, they could not answer.

When I asked why Shortbus, which features, among other things, an actor masturbating and then ejaculating on his face was given an R, while our film, which explore sexual pleasure inside the context of committed real-life loving relationships, they could not answer.

When I asked why numerous videos from the Sinclair Institute, which feature various sex acts performed by paid models, and presented under the guise of education are given R , while our film, which are held in the libraries of The Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana, Planned Parenthood, The Gay Mens Health Crisis, The San Francisco Sex Information Hotline and many other health and education organizations are given an X, they could not answer.

They have told me the process is subjective and imperfect; yet this process has a “perfect” track record of marginalizing our films.

Now they would ask that we once again submit our work to this subjective and imperfect process, pay $1,000 for the privilege of doing so, against the hope that the fifth time’s the charm.

I may be a fool, but I’m not that kind of fool.

Writing about “Ashley and Kisha” Megan Spencer said, “The sweetest thing - Kisha & Ashley is one of the sweetest love stories you’re ever likely to see committed to film. The Comstocks once again put their perfect documentary formula to good use - true love and real sex - on screen; what’s not to like?!”

True love and real sex, what’s not to like indeed?

Obviously the OFLC has no problem with real sex. It has granted its R classification to 9 Songs, Shortbus, and many other videos containing real sex. It has granted a festival exemption to Destricted, which contains real sex.

One can only conclude that the problem the OFLC has is with true love, and what a pity that is; for this film, for the people who wanted to see it, and for Australia.

A poster for the MUFF screening, somewhere in Melbourne’s Fitzroy district

Over the last 48 hours we’ve been writing and talking to a lot of people, including Amy Wooding, exemptions officer at the OFLC.

What has become clear is that the OFLC’s decision to ban seven films from this year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival is an act of retaliation.

In Australia, film festivals are required to submit a list of the unclassified films they wish to screen to the OFLC and get permission to screen them. Unclassified films would include student work, undistributed work, films from outside Australia that do not yet have Australian distribution, basically any film that has not, and perhaps will never be put through Australia’s manditory ~$800 classification process.

Last year MUFF’s list included our film “Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together”, which had already been classified X by the OFLC, and the OFLC refused to grant a festival exemption to screen the film, and warned the festival not to screen the film. (The full details Aussie classification system, and the Kafkaesque x-rating is a subject for another post.)

MUFF went ahead and put “Damon and Hunter” on the program anyway. The fact that this was being done in defiance of OFLC orders was kept secret, even from me. This was our first festival outting, and we didn’t know what to expect. But we postered, blitzed the local press and hoped for the best.

In fact, so many people turned out that only by the luck that our distributor had another copy in her bag were there able to put the film up on a second screen for the overflow. By all accounts the screening was very well received.

From there the film was invited to screen at Sydney’s QueerDOC, and was scheduled to play two nights. Again the OFLC rejected the festival’s request for an exemption, only QueerDOC, citing among other things, their need to ask the OFLC’s permission to screen nearly all of the films they program, and their dependence on government funding, complied with the OFLC’s demands.

At the time, I was rather angry that QueerDOC did not go ahead with the screening of “Damon and Hunter.” But in light of the retaliatory action by the OFLC against MUFF, it would seem that QueerDOC’s course of action, if not especially courageous, was prudent. MUFF receives no government funding, but the OFLC has punnished MUFF by applying its censorship powers as broadly as it can to MUFF’s 2007 roster of film.

What happens next? Who knows.

Every Aussie filmmaker who hopes to see their work play outside the edit bay must bear in mind the OFLC as they cut their film. Every Australian distributor and festival programmer knows they must submit their films to the OFLC. Every DVD shop knows that when they sell DVDs of films that have not been classfied by the OFLC, they do so in the halflight of a selectively enforce law. I don’t know how many of our Australian collegues want to speak out against this tyranical action by the OFLC. I don’t know if any of them feel they can risk speaking out.

Our Aussie distributor is beside herself. She’s the sort of distributor every independent filmmaker dreams of finding, a passionate, tireless advocate of our work. But for now, she and MUFF would seem to stand alone. There has been no outcry, no call to arms. Right now would seem as if the Australian film community simply looks on and says, “There but for the grace of God go I” – and maybe they’re right.

More news if there is more news.

Here are the seven films that the Australian government has banned from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival:

70k
Schulmädchen-Report: Was Eltern nicht für möglich halten (aka The Schoolgirl Report)
Sex Wish
The Farmer’s Daughter
Ashley & Kisha: Finding the Right Fit
Whore
60 Second Relief

Think about this for a moment.

We’re not talking about the government of Iran or Saudi Arabia dictating what films a festival can and can’t show.

We’re not talking about self-appointed morality police picketing, protesting and lobbying.

We’re talking about the Australian government, in 2007, dictating what can and cannot be screened in a film festival.

Sons and daughters of Gallipoli, is this what you want?

MUFF poster for ASHLEY AND KISHA, courtesy of my lovely and talented wife!

“Dear Mr. Comstock,

“We would like to screen ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT at Out on Film in Atlanta. The festival will take place October 11-18, though at this point a specific screening date and time has not been determined…”

We do have a date, time, venue for ASHLEY AND KISHA at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and a great mini review from Australian film critic Megan Spencer:

“The sweetest thing - Ashley & Kisha is one of the sweetest love stories you’re ever likely to see committed to film. The Comstocks once again put their perfect documentary formula to good use - true love and real sex - on screen; what’s not to like?!”

ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT
10.15pm Saturday 29th September Glitch Bar in Fitzroy.

Poster coming soon!

Hooray!

I woke up this morning to the news that ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT has been selected for the 2007 Melbourne Underground Film Festival, running this September in Melbourne, Australia.

DAMON AND HUNTER played two sold-out screens at last year’s festival, and was ultimately named Best Documentary, so I was worried that A&K would get tossed in the “been there, done that” file.

But no! We’re in, and the film’s already got a good bit of buzz going down under. I can’t wait for Peggy to design the poster!

It’s official! ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT will play at this year’s Long Beach Q Film Festival, taking place October 12-14 at the historic art deco style Art Theater.

Yay!

“Tired of watching “erotic” movies where cheesy gay for pay chicks bore each other? Well, Ashley & Kisha: Finding The Right Fit is the movie for you.”

That’s the opening line from a
very nice review of ASHLEY AND KISHA on the black lesbian erotica site Kuma. The review closes with this:

“Ashley and Kisha seem to be a little nervous at first, after all there are other people in the room. Once they get into the zone, it’s like the outside world doesn’t exist. They aren’t performing/putting on a show, they are focused on loving each other. It’s a very beautiful film.”

It’s a point of pride with me that our set run in a way that it is a place were people can lose themselves in one another, even while we slide around them, cameras purring, even with the magazine changes, and the other things that usually aren’t there when people make love. So it’s nice when the people we film tell us they were able to let go and enjoy themselves, and it’s nice when people who watch our films can see that the couple is actually there for each other’s pleasure, the camera a privileged witness, rather than the sole reason they are having sex.

That’s the headline for the very nice write up of ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT in the latest issue of Bnews, and Australian Gay and Lesbian magazine.

It’s especially nice to see a write-up in Bnews, because the last time they were writing something about one of our movies, it was about the unfortunate run-in we had with the OFLC over the (ultimately cancelled) screening of DAMON AND HUNTER at queerDOC, Australia’s premiere gay and lesbian film festival.

Hopefully we’ll have better luck with ASHLEY AND KISHA on the Aussie festival circuit!

Blowfish is where I discovered sex didn’t suck. Or rather Blowfish is where I discovered that the sex business didn’t have to suck. It was in their online catalog that I first found things like Vixen Creations Dildos or the work of Jullian Snelling and started to wonder why there weren’t sex videos that were equally well made.

Blowfish was also the first American retailer to buy our first film, MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, so I’m always anxious to hear what they think of our films. It’s not that I think they’d hate anything we’d produced, but I hold Blowfish in extra high esteem, and I want them to be extra charmed with what we offer them. You can imagine the sigh of relief when I read this in the Blowfish weekly newsletter:

“We like Tony Comstock’s movies. He specializes in documentaries that all follow the same basic pattern: a long interview with a couple, mostly about their sex life but also about the origin of their romance, followed by a long sex scene. The end result is strangely intimate — having heard so much about their lives, it’s quite moving to watch these people have sex. In a field where sleaze and vulgarity are pretty much part of the atmosphere, Comstock’s films provide a welcome touch of class, and they’re often as much about love as lust.“Ashley and Kisha: Finding the Right Fit is Comstock’s first film devoted to a lesbian couple, and they’re wonderful subjects, funny and sweet and willing to laugh at themselves. (The fact that they’re totally gorgeous is a bonus.) Their story has the satisfying contours of a romantic comedy: Ashley the openly gay student athlete pursues straight college girl Kisha, who turns out to be not quite as straight as she’d always assumed. There’s even a cute meet, when Kisha barges into the bathroom at a party where Ashley is making out with her ex-girlfriend; Ashley confessed that, though she slept with her ex that night, she was really thinking about the glimpse she got of Kisha’s ass in the bathroom.

During his promotion of his film SHORTBUS one of the things John Cameron Mitchell said was, “We tried to de-eroticize the sex to see what kind of emotions and ideas are left over when the haze of eroticism is waved away…by the end if you’re thinking only about the sex, then you have a problem.”

Peggy and I watched SHORTBUS together, in bed, on a Friday night, after the kids were fast asleep, and I guess we don’t have a problem, because by the end of the movie we were not thinking about sex so much that we didn’t even have sex ourselves. Mitchell had so successfully “de-eroticized” the sex that SHORTBUS effectively squelched my usually rampant libido.

The problem that I do have is with the idea that arousal, that sexual desire, that erotic pleasure is some sort of haze that keeps us from seeing our better selves. This idea utterly pervades the discussion of sexual art – from The United States v. Ulysses, to Sir Quintin of the BBFC, to Mitchell’s strange pride that although “all the orgasms and all the semen in SHORTBUS were real…no one in the audience got a hard-on” – artists and audiences both are obliged to deny and devalue the the erotic, to say (true or not) that their interest in sex lies elsewhere.

Fine. Whatever. Not me.

I love exploring the erotic. I love hearing what turns people on, I love seeing what turns people on, I love seeing what people do when they are turned on. I love the idea that sex can be restorative, curative, and connective. I love that getting hard or wet or whatever is a part of falling in love, and being in love, and staying in love. And I love making films about it.

I love when people watch my films and laugh and cry and sigh, and most of all, I love when people watch my films and get turned on. I love hearing about the gushy wanks and lusty tumbles these films inspire. I love hearing about how, after watching our films, lovers trip down memory lane, recounting their own “hardcore love stories”, and then add another chapter right there and then!

Does that make me a romantic, or a recovering romantic or a delusional romantic? Yes, and I’m proud to be one, and proud and delighted to see another one of our films at Blowfish.com!