Kamikaze Hearts

San Francisco in the 1980s: The young director Tigr is trying to gain a foothold in the porn industry. Her experienced partner Mitch plays the leading role her film, a sex parody of the opera “Carmen”. After the final take, the women have sex with each other and talk about what the experiences on set have done to them and their relationship. In Juliet Bashore's queer film classic, the boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred: Tigr and Mitch really were a couple and worked together in the porn industry; in the film, acted scenes alternate with documentary observations. The result is an unsparing portrait of an industry, in which misogyny, abuse of power and intensive drug use were the order of the day - but it is also a self-reflexive, sex-positive and queer-feminist film about a passionate and all-consuming love. (js)