The OFLC can’t stop thousands of unclassified DVDs from being sold illegally throughout Australia, but they did manage to stop the Melbourne Underground Film Festival from screening ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT in front of an audience of movie lovers at a small cinema in the Fitzroy district of Melbourne, (just to be sure, the OFLC sent a police detail to the theater the night of the screening.) The OFLC’s refusal to grant ASHLEY AND KISHA an exemption to play at MUFF comes right on the heels of “special attention” being paid to a number of gay and lesbian book and DVD stores in Melbourne. For some reason, the OFLC seems to take a special interest in what Australia’s G&L is watching on DVD.

If any good has come out of this whole mess, it’s that after years of silence, the topic of censorship is making headlines in Australia again.

Lesbian Film Banned, Melbourne Community Voice
http://mcv.e-p.net.au/news/lesbian-film-banned.html

Gay Movies Muffed, Bnews
http://www.bnews.net.au/content/view/605/66/

Radio Interview on ABC’s Hack news program
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/notes/mp3s/hack_muff.mp3

Film classification laws out of sync with the 21st century
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/09/30/1191090938881.html

Fundmentally for Your Own Good, by Dean Bertum
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22531928-7583,00.html?from=public_rss

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?

I just found out that while I slept, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has informed the Melbourne Underground Film Festival that they will not be given exemptions for about a half-dozen films, including ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT.

Last year our film DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER had its world premiere at MUFF, and went on to be named Best Documentary. From there it was invited to show at two screenings at QueerDOC Gay and Lesbian Film Documentary Film Festival in Sydney, but the festival was threatened by the OFLC with both a fine and jail time, and QueerDOC elected not to show our film.

More news when I have more news.

Last week, one of our best friends in Australia, OutDVD received notice from the Australian Attorney General’s Office demanding that they remove all unclassified DVDs from their retail and rental inventory.

Unclassified material makes up two thirds of OutDVD’s stock, and includes DVDs such as the third season of the critically acclaimed Showtime series THE L WORD, our own ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT, and many other titles of interest to Australia’s gay and lesbian community.

Please take a moment and sign OutDVD’s online petition to the AG’s office.

If you’re not a registered user with your super-secret “adult titles” search enabled, you can’t.

You can find 9 SONGS, a film about a fictional pair of rock-show going, coke-snorting lovers, that famously features explicit footage of felatio, cunnilingus, coitus, and even a pop-shot.

You can find PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, the film that shared the Best Documentary prize with DAMON AND HUNTER at the 2006 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

You can even find MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, our first erotic documentary title.

But you can’t find DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER.

Says IMDB:

“The IMDb contains over 400,000 different movie titles. The aim of the database is to cover as many titles and genres as possible. As a result, some of these titles contain words or expressions that some of our users may find inappropriate and some movies themselves may also fall into this category. To provide some level of control for those of a sensitive nature some adult titles have been made searchable only by users who are registered with the IMDb and have requested access to this material.”

“Inappropriate.” Apparently an intimate film about two young men in love, and loving one another is “inappropriate.”

Caligola,, Bob Guccione’s notorious bait and switch production isn’t “inappropriate.”

Neither is Love Camp 7, the infamous Nazi exploitation flick. (From the IMDB listing, “The film contains numerous scenes of women prisoners being abused, tortured and humiliated by their Nazi captors. Indeed the whole purpose of the work is to invite male viewers to relish the spectacle of naked women being humiliated for their titillation. LOVE CAMP 7 contains both eroticised depictions of sexual violence and repeated association of sex with restraint, pain, and humiliation.”)

Apparently Pink Flamingos, which (among other things) features an actor eating dog shit, isn’t “inappropriate” either.

But according to IMDB, DAMON AND HUNTER, an award-winning documentary film featuring a consentual love-scene between committed lovers is “inappropriate,” and viewers with more delicate sensiblities must be protected from the pain they might feel should they accidentally stumble across DAMON AND HUNTER in the course of browsing through IMDB.

We’ve been here before.

Last Summer, the Australian OFLC “protected” the good people of Sydney from accidently stumbling into the queerDOC Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and being exposed to DAMON & HUNTER.

Last Fall, a printer in North Carolina refused to print the above poster for DAMON & HUNTER, lest anyone in their plant be exposed to the image of two men about to kiss.

IMDB’s been here before too. Last January, IMDB hid John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS in the section for “inappropriate” films. (An uproar ensued across the indie film world prompting IMDB to move SHORTBUS from the “inappropriate” section to the “appropriate” section” by the end of the day.)

Of course compared to us SHORTBUS and ThinkFilm are a marketing juggernaut. John Cameron Mitchell’s been quoted in a hundred places pronouncing that SHORTBUS isn’t arrousing and isn’t porn, where I’m quite proud of the fact that (at least for some people) DAMON AND HUNTER is quite arousing, and I’m ambivalent about the p-word. (Short version, it tells you more about the person saying it than it does about the film they’re applying it to.)

I’m also ambivelent about trying to get IMDB to change the listing. Not because I’m happy to have DAMON & HUNTER hidden away, but because I know that trying to get IMDB to change it will take a lot of time and effort. Comstock Films is me and my wife Peggy, there’s only so much of us to go around. And after financing, producing, editing, and marketing these films, there’s not always that much left over for fighting battles with people like the OFLC or IMDB. Sometimes I feel a little ground down,

What I am not ambivalent about is that Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together is not “inappropriate” film, and if “sensitive” IMDB users don’t need to be protected from stumbling across listings for CALIGOLA, LOVE CAMP 7, or PINK FLAMINGOS, they most certainly don’t need to be “protected” from accidentally seeing the listing for DAMON & HUNTER.

UPDATE

You can also find HONEY AND BUNNY, which played along side DAMON & HUNTER at the New York CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up shot of a half-eaten peach lodged in a woman’s vagina, as well as FILTHY FOOD, which also played with D&H at the CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up footage of a woman performing “oral sex” on a variety of foods in the place of penises, vulvas, and breasts.

Yesterday was a blood-bath. The Google Site Index for Comstock Films continues to look extremely weird, full of robot.txt excluded pages, and even pages that haven’t been live on our website for years, and our Google search related traffic is in the toilet.

Why does Googles’s index of our site have pages that we took down two years ago? I don’t know. Why does it have pages from directories we’ve excluded from indexing in our robot.txt? I don’t know. (And yes, we checked them using Google’s webmaster tools.) Why doesn’t the site index have our important and well-linked to pages like index.html and main.html? I don’t know. I wish I did, and I wish I knew what to do to fix it.

Adding to my puzzlement, while here the US, ComstockFilms.com is somewhere around page 10 for the search ‘real sex’ our site continues to enjoy a relatively high position for the search in Australia (currently page 1) and the UK (currently page 3).

There’s a certain irony to this. Both Australia and the UK have government-imposed ratings for films, and our DVDs are illegal to sell in most of Australia and in all of the UK.

Coincidentally, a copy of our first film MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY is currently at the Motion Picture Association of America, and we expect a rating decision by the end of the month. No doubt the film will receive an NC-17, which means adults only.

50 years ago there were only two ratings; adults only and general audience. Children couldn’t get into adults only films, not even with their parents. Adult films were for adults in the same way that bars are for adults.

But somewhere along the way we lost the idea of exclusively adult cinema. Yes, the MPAA has an adults only rating, but it’s an economic dead-zone. SHORTBUS went out unrated, rather than bear the stigma of the NC-17 rating. (Many media outlets will not accept advertisements for films rated NC-17, and some theaters will not show them.)

Conversely, the ultra-violent SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a film that is utter inappropriately for children was given an R by the MPAA, which means kindergardeners can go see it, provided they are accompanied by a parent or guardian.

I can understand (both commercially and ethically) the MPAA wanting save PRIVATE RYAN from the burden of carrying the NC-17 rating, but the idea that it’s a film suitable for children of any age, provided they are accompanied by an adult is manifestly absurd. Although what can be shown is far more permissive than it was 50 years ago, in the process we’ve given up the space for adults to experience genuinely adult films.

Meanwhile, in Australia and the UK, there is a litigate adults only rating. In Australia and the UK, rated-R means no one under 18, and that’s the rating films like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN receive in those countries, (and SHORTBUS and DESTRICTED because they’re not intended to arouse!)

(Lest I sound too in love with the Australian and UK system, please remember that their systems are manditory and governement imposed, and that’s why our films are illegal to sell in Australia and the UK.)

MARIE & JACK will have its MPAA rating by the end of the month, an NC-17; and have no intention of running from the rating. In fact, we intend to embrace it, to wear our NC-17 as a badge of honor.

Like the rest of our work, MARIE & JACK is a film for adults about the very adult experience of sex. No, it’s not okay to bring your kids. Maybe you think it’s okay to bring them to see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but you can’t bring them to see MARIE & JACK. It’s grown-up time now, and this is a movie for grown-ups to watch with other grown-ups. We don’t want to here your 12 year-old giggling, or you stammering when she asks an awkward question. Get a sitter, or stay home, or wait for it to come out on DVD.

A very nice note came in over the weekend. By permission of the author:

“Hi Tony,I suspect you are at the AVN Awards tonight — having a lovely time I hope — but I just watched _Matt and Khym_ (I was a pre-order customer) and couldn’t wait to email you. I found this couple utterly delightful and feel I could not overstate my praise for this film.

Coming on the heels of our misadventure with PBS, this note is especially welcome.

We make enough money through this work to sustain us financially, but against the constant backdrop of vilification, it can be tremendously draining emotionally. Whether it’s the OFLC or PBS, or printer that won’t print a poster because it’s “pornographic”, their cravenness and my own impotence in the face of that cravenness is exhausting, it’s discouraging, and sometimes I just want to quit.

Then I get a note like Emily’s, or I read a post like Jenn P’s, and I feel like we’re doing something important, something that matters, something that makes the world a better place. And I decide I can quite tomorrow.

“I have been a photographer my entire adult life. In the name of bearing witness to the human condition I’ve documented unspeakable suffering, violence, and death; and for that I’ve been praised as a courageous witness. When I review the scope of people, places and events that have passed before my lens, I am unable to comprehend the censor’s rationale for “protecting” adults from photographic images of sexuality. Adults have the capacity and the right to choose for themselves what sort of images they wish to see. They do not need to be protected from images of sex, and least of all from a film like DAMON AND HUNTER. In the face of horrific images we are exposed to each and every day, the OFLC decision is not only unfair, it is perverse.” –Tony Comstock, An Open Letter to the OFLC