Passion

The black mare of the festival, one of the most interesting productions last year, is an ambiguous take on feminist and queer BDSM conventions. The film by Maja Borg, one of the unique figures of Swedish experimental cinema, is a story at the intersection of a documentary narrative, fiction, and experiment. Rarely does cinema belong to so many genres at once, and it seems rather odd to combine radical sexual practices with a sincere search for God, personal experience of Christianity, and an emotional bid to deal with one’s own trauma. Passion is a multithreaded, elaborately woven take that openly confronts Protestant spirituality and takes it as a point of reference for a reflection on the metaphysics of practices of domination and submission. Passion includes footage from the making of another film: Hold by Marit Ostberg (which received prizes at the Porn Film Festival Berlin 2021 and Cinemakink 2022 NYC). Interestingly, both Borg and Ostberg meet again after they began their artistic journey in Dirty Diaries, a project that launched postporn in Scandinavia. In the meantime, Marit became the most progressive visual artist of queer BDSM and Maja the most inquisitive. Try not to miss it.