Viva Erotica returns 25.-28.4.2024!
VIVA EROTICA – A Splendid Movie Orgy 25.-28.4.2024
Day One: Back to the Chicken Ranch
Five years ago, we opened Viva Erotica with Colin Higgins’ The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1981), a naughty musical extravaganza about the Chicken Ranch, an illegal and yet legendary thus truly Texan bordello – which had to close in 1973. But that was not the end of the story, for which reason we now return on opening night of Viva Erotica 2024 to the Chicken Ranch – the new one, opened three years after the original place’s demise by wily entrepreneur Walter Plankinton in Nevada. Driven by the grand ole myth and curious about the daily doings at this actually a bit dingy looking place, British documentarists Sandi Sissel & Nick Broomfield came for a look – and got, let’s say, maybe not quite what they expected… Yippie! But the Chicken Ranch wasn’t the sole 70s Texas sex sensation – there were also the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders who from 1970 on transformed chaste sideline acrobatics into a spectacle of wholesome All American hotness. In 1978, Jim Clark turned mini-skirt spunk and butt-wiggle cheek into pure porn with the classic Debbie Does Dallas; Jim Buckley’s even more raucous 1981 sequel Debbie Does Dallas II, then, finds the erstwhile cheerleader working… in a Chicken Ranch’y brothel! Yep, folks, this is how popular culture works: round and around! Welcome to Viva Erotica!
18:00 Chicken Ranch (1982; Sandi Sissel & Nick Broomfield; DCP; 1h14min)
20:00 Debbie Does Dallas II (1981; Jim Buckley; DCP; 1h21min)
Day Two: God Respects Us When We Worship but He Loves Us When We Do It!
Porn and religion belong together, as nothing makes sex better than that sweet sense of sin, right? As erotic cinema had a field day with foxy nuns and randy priests since the very beginning of the art, we shall look on Day Three at a few especially unique specimens of cinema sordida! Starting with Kyrkoherden by Swedish blue movie stalwart Torgny Wickman, a bizarre example of heritage erotica with a horror twist: A condemned witch curses a zealous clergyman whose offspring shall hence suffer from a constant hard-on – which the village women partake of only too gladly in an age where able men were away at war. Next comes a monument to porn kitsch, Wakefield Poole’s Bible! (1973), featuring three of the Good Book’s most famous couplings in tres gaudy presentations: Adam & Eve, David & Bathsheba and Samson & Delilah. After so much joy and good humour, things get a bit more deviant t’wards the end of the night, but shall remain nevertheless humorous in grandmaster Walerian Borowczyk’s wicked satire on power relations, corruption and the will of the flesh, Behind Convent Walls (1978). Here, nuns in heat have all kinds of reasons to proclaim: He has risen…
18:00 Kyrkoherden (1970; Torgny Wickman; 35mm;1h30min) subtitles in Finnish
20:00 Wakefield Poole’s Bible! (1974; Wakefield Poole; DCP; 1:24)
22:00 Behind Convent Halls (1978; Walerian Borowczy; DCP 1:35)
Day Three: The Pornographic Imagination
Day three is dedicated to the climaxes and pitfalls of the overeager sex obsessed mind. From early on, erotica loved to frame its flights of fuck frenzy as imaginations of writers, painters, directors or ordinary people with just too damn much fantasy: Real life encounters get turned into saucy stories, or fabulous tales of sexual derring-do get in the way of getting laid in life proper. In feminist film pioneer Nelly Kaplan’s casually ironic Néa (1976), a teenage girl from one of those typical 70s French pervy high society families wants to write an erotic bestseller but needs to find out what the whole fuckfuss is really about… The secretary turned hooker-Hausfrau on holiday in Heiße Löcher, geile Stecher (1977) also has a lot of money, and she tells the audience gladly how she made it, with secret filming of illicit trysts playing a part in proceedings… After this delightfully vulgar XXX farce, we need an acerbic comedy to mellow out of the day. This is provided by Polish maestro Marek Koterski’s luridly titled Porno (1989), in which he shows his perennial protagonist, pan Miauczyński, during a very long night of Kopfkino featuring all the women he ever bedded and whom he never really understood…
18:00 Néa – niin nuori… niin utelias (1976; Nelly Kaplan; 35mm 1h30min) subtitles in Finnish
20:00 Heiße Löcher, geile Stecher (1979; Hans Billian; 35mm 1h18min)
22:00 Porno (1990; Marek Koterski; DCP; 1h18min)
Day Four: Shooting Porn
Some dirty movies got already made fly-on-the-wall gonzo style yesterday, but now, on Day Four, the last of this year’s splendid movie orgy, shooting films is the main subject. As this is a year full of major names making their maiden appearance at Viva Erotica, Bruce La Bruce was an almost mandatory auteur to feature finally, and how better to celebrate his arrival in our program then with his movie à clef extraordinaire Super 8½ (1994), in which Bruce plays a Bruce who’s also a porn actor-director but one with a past more glorious looking than his future – which puts some squirrely ideas into the head of lesbian documentary crafter Googie… Then, Candy Flip & Theo Meow, the perfomer-director duo of The Sad Girls of the Mountains (2019), unveils for us the secrets of a mysterious sex-positive feminist community of young women who want to be sad, horny, web-celebrated and politically active in a slightly idiosyncratic fashion: by making porn. And so, we close Viva Erotica 2024 with a post-porn meta-movie masterpiece!
17:00 Super 8½ (1994; Bruce LaBruce; DCP 1h39min)
19:15 Sad Girls of The Mountains (2019; Candy Flip & theo Meow; DCP 1h22min)
Liput 10,00 €
Päiväpassi 15,00 € / 25,00 €
Koko festivaali 55 €
