Come Back Strong With 50 Bellydancers!

Rope is super serious!

So, it’s been a while, months in fact. I don’t really have any excuse except that I’ve been busy with real life stuff and people stuff. Nothing bad, in fact it’s fair to say that things are going pretty bloody brilliantly at the moment. But I’ve let my writing and my blogging slip, and that’s something I’m planning on correcting, starting now:

Now, don’t for a microsecond think that I haven’t been doing anything. In fact the fruits of one of my labours is about to come to full ripeness. That’s right, my directorial porn debut is right around the corner.

Rope is super serious!

Porn is stern serious stuff…

I’ll be posting more about the festival at the time and hopefully afterwards, but for now I just want to give a little glimpse behind the curtain of this project.

It all started when I spotted a post by Whatever World about the upcoming London Porn Film Festival. Very much like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, this one seeks to embrace all manner of queer feminist indie porn. I went to the Berlin festival back in October so the prospect of having something similar in London was absolutely fantastic. What was even better was when I realised that the deadline for submissions hadn’t passed yet.

That said, the deadline was only a handful fo days away, surely too short to find a suitable performer, equipment, crew and teach myself film-making. Well that’s what I thought as I idly started sending out feelers… except the feelers struck gold in the form of the very lovely Fauni Cate. Fauni was available that weekend… as was I.

What followed was an incredibly intense few days wherein we made arrangements, I secured camera equipment and with the help of some friends managed to pull together everything necessary to make a film in a terrifyingly short space of time. It involved late nights, confusion, stress, occasional tears, especially when my poor five-year-old laptop crashed mid-edit and a near breakdown while trying to comprehend how video compression works.

And looking back on it now it’s strange to see the film, that strange island of intimacy and sensuality amidst the chaos of working to an impossible deadline.

So yes it’s a little rough around the edges, but given the circumstances I’m incredibly proud of this film and everyone involved in making it.

It’s called “Fauni Thighs” and will be played as part of the “Kick Ass Love” programme showing at 17:30 this Friday 7th April and 22:30 Saturday 8th. I’ll be there 🙂 I hope as many lovely folks as can make it will be there too.



Charlie J Forrest