The Sex Film Project

Sex is a matrix. It's the bundled nerve endings of our emotional lives. It's where all our joys, fears, traumas and hopes find their unconscious voices. We, as filmmakers, respect and love the complexity of sex and we feel it's been cinematically hijacked by people who don't.

from http://www.thesexfilmproject.com

EXPLICIT SEX IN FILM

Hollywood's treatment of sex is clearly condescending, reductive and disappointing, but North American independents, foreign art films, non-narrative experimental films and even pornography can be just as frustrating. Some narrative indie films might have satisfying stories, but they all tend to come up short on full-bodied, uncensored sexual presentation. Some recent French-helmed art films work hard narratively and are refreshingly uncensored, but are often pretentious, humorless and deliberately unsexy. Experimental films can be sexually explicit, but narratively lazy. Pornography, created for the sole purpose of getting you off, can certainly be spontaneous and stirring, especially when the performers are freed from a constricting camera and actually into it (as in the best of 70's and early 80's porn). But, narratively, intellectually and emotionally, porn is almost invariably flat.

THIS FILM

We'd like to make a film with a strong traditional narrative: a seriously humorous exploration of romantic and sexual relationships in a modern New York City pansexual bohemian environment where gender, sexuality, art, music and politics are fluid and volatile. We want to examine ideas of monogamy and how they differ in certain same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. We want to study how sex and love can be mutually exclusive and illustrate the quest to unite them.

In traditional Hollywood terms, this film would have the kind of humor and emotion of a film like Y Tu Mama Tambien but with much more explicit sex. We're also inspired by the tone and themes of films about intense relationships like John Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz , Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together , Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid , Frank Ripploh's Taxi Zum Klo , Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories , Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance , Robert Altman's Three Women and A Wedding , even Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (check some of these out).