Toronto’s spring film festival season is upon us, which means an influx of films and filmmakers from around the world, and a flurry of press releases announcing award winners. I don’t know who will take home the top prizes at Hot Docs, Inside/Out or Worldwide Shorts, but I do know that the winners won’t be getting glass butt plugs in the shape of Emma Goldman — that’s a privilege reserved for honorees at the third annual Feminist Porn Awards, presented by the good folks at local sex-prop shop Good For Her. 

“In order to be awarded with a coveted Emma,” explains Good For Her’s manager, Alison Lee, “a film has to be feminist by design or by chance — and be sizzling hot.” Lee is one of two jurors for this year’s festival; the other is Skin Tight Outta Sight performer CoCo La Crème, who also happens to be Good For Her’s porn buyer. “What we are looking for,” says Lee, “are hot scenes that are not about exploitation, but about joyous exploration of sexuality.”

That description certainly applies to Stockholm-born filmmaker Erika Lust’s 5 Hot Stories For Her, a Barcelona-based production comprised of five sweaty stand-alone vignettes. On her website, Lust, a self-described “adventurous spirit,” says that she’s making films for a distaff constituency that “wants something harder than Sex and the City but cooler than traditional porn.”  Such ethos-on-her-sleeve pronouncements smack of self-regard, but even if these slickly produced porn-lets don’t break new ground, they do constitute an enjoyable trawl through staked-out territory.
Ms Lust is apparently journeying up from South America for the festival’s awards ceremony on April 4 at the Gladstone Hotel, which features performances by the aforementioned Ms La Crème, dance troupe Daddy K and the Rhythm Method and DJ MissRuckus. She’ll also be there on April 5 when the nominated films are screened at the Revue Cinema. Other invitees include Loree Erickson, director and star of the short autobiographical documentary Want (pictured above). As she’s based in Toronto, it’ll be a shorter trip. Want, which played last year at Inside/Out, opens with a scene of its wheelchair-bound director being pleasured by her partner — and pointedly refusing a suggestion to draw the curtains. Erickson, who is currently working on a PhD at York University, puts herself on display to dispel the notion that disability precludes an active sex life. Confident and fetchingly impressionistic, Want is precisely the sort of exhibitionistic gesture we need. Give the woman an Emma.

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