Brussels Porn Film Festival
Brussels Porn Film Festival is a festival dedicated to alternative pornographies, sexually explicit representations that projects a diversity of fantasies, bodies and practices into the world. Born by the need to break with established norms, alternative pornography is a place where marginalized groups who are usually excluded from dominant representation find a powerful place of expression and reappropriation.
The BxlPFF is the first and biggest porn film festival in Belgium, presenting a diverse program going from arthouse films to DIY projects fuelled with a political desire to showcase different approaches, practices and bodies of the most watched and produced film genre in the world.
Who’s involved in it?
The team behind Brussels Porn Film Festival is a heterogeneous crowd gathered from the most diverse corners of artistic, sexual and social fields! Brave hustlers that built the festival from scratch, fighting the lack of financing for sexually related content, we are a group of scholars, pornographers & cineast, sexworkers & performers, photographers & designers, etc. (we are in between 4 and 6, depending how you are counting).
What’s your origin story and your motivation?
The origin of the festival is about three of us meeting in a bar because friends in common told us that we had the same idea : creating a porn festival through a queer perspective, because we were deeply missing it - especially here, in Brussels, we couldn’t get why it was not there yet ! Then, we quickly understood : it took us two years of hard work (Covid, lack of money, places and people closing their doors when porn was coming on the table) before the first edition happened, in 2022. Luckily, the three of the beginning quickly turned to be fifteen and even as quickly got stabilized around five to six people. Something we can be sure about is that we couldn’t have succeeded such a mission without these powerful links created ! As a team, we were also supporting the SNAP! festival (Sexworkers Narrative Arts and Performance), created and curated by one of the team members. For our second edition, it appeared clearly that it was making sense to reunite both these interconnected events ! We are so glad to now present a linked perception between porn & sexwork art and performance, we are sure it will enrich so much our perceptions !
Do you want to share a special memory with us?
The first ever opening night of the festival, 21st of April 2022, we were so stressed out considering the years of work and fight and the unexpected overcrowded theater that we almost didn’t succeed to come on stage to (finally !!) present our baby to the audience. Tears, panic attacks, laughter, stress, overwhelming joy… Kind of a nutshell of the past years within a few hours, that it became almost unbearable. Luckily the audience was amazing, so kind and empathic, we were surrounded by so many understanding and enthusiastic people that we succeeded ! Even if we still don’t know how haha
What are some of your favorite spots in Brussels?
Nova Cinema Bar - and Nova Cinema - but that might be because we are filling this form there. It also might be because we don’t know any place like this in Brussels, and it’s even so rare on a much larger scale. What they do, the way they do it, they are quite amazing. Go there, have a drink and try their amazing indie cinema prog !
Where can we find you virtually and/or physically?
Brussels Porn Film Festival, 2023
