That porn was shown on the big screen was success enough, but Berlin’s first Porn Film Festival broke lots of new ground. For better or worse, the audience was relatively tame, because onlookers weren’t there just to have fun, they were there to view the new face of porn—post porn. Post porn recognizes its own exploitative history and widens definitions of hot porn sex.

The two-week festival was kicked off by the Post Porn Politics Symposium, a weekend of presentations, lectures and performances by academics, artists and performers interested in challenging porn status quo. The film festival was post porn theory in action, on the big screen. Many films were from a feminist, queer, and/or transgender perspective and simply didn’t look like everything else out there.

As filmmaker Bruce LaBruce put it, “porn should be a space where any desire or fetish can be worked out rather than being guilty about it … losing this is the danger of mainstreaming porn.”

Post porn welcomes the kind of sex we have in our “real lives” into porn and porn fantasy into our real lives. Post porn defies the physical nature of our bodies (our sex, our outward appearance) and envisions a world where “anyone can become a porn star” and any kind of sex can be the subject of porn, because porn and private sex move beyond gay/straight/bi or male/female/trans categories.

Post porn is defined by our postmodern, Internet-affected relationship with time/space. Computer technology imagines new possibilities for real, artificial and cyborg bodies and the Internet not only allows a person access to any type of porn at any time from any place in the world, it also enables “live” interaction in cyberspace. The Internet literally makes it possible for anyone to make and broadcast his or her own porn (for one example, see PornoTube.com).

The opening film of the festival, Shu Lea Cheang’s I.K.U., exemplifies many aspects of post porn. I.K.U. is set in a future where the orgasm has become commodified. For example, a new ecstasy pill functions by tapping into the user’s memory of the best orgasm they’ve ever experienced.

This version of I.K.U. was in fact not the hardcore version that was screened at Sundance (where Cheang was told her film could never go commercial), but in no way lacks a wide variety of sex scenes involving poly-sexual characters equipped with poly-genitalia, both “real” and “artificial”—men with vaginas and cyborgs who can instantly morph their arms into penises. Gender fluidity includes prosthesis and artifice, strap-on dildos and orgy scenes with puff doll bodies as well as human bodies.

After the screening, director Shu Lea Cheang took the stage and confessed that she had “failed terribly.” By trying to appeal to so many people, perhaps she had appealed to no one. “I think that’s what porn is,” she seemed to decide at that moment. “You have a targeted audience. I didn’t have a targeted audience because I tried to cover all the gender possibilities.”

Hot or not, I.K.U. was no doubt transgressive, while still looking more like “porn” than “art.” But some films screened at the festival might be more easily called art than porn, which is precisely the point of post porn—it’s an effort to blend and mask that dividing line.

GirlsWhoLikePorno(.com) are two filmmakers, artists and VJs from Barcelona who conduct workshops for women about women in the porn industry. After a lecture and discussion which includes a feminist history lesson, the workshop turns to actual filming—where workshop participants are given the chance to make their own porn right then and there, using whatever fantasies or challenges they want to conquer.

Up until the week of the film festival, the workshops have only been open to women because, as founder Maria Llopis explained, porn has affected women differently than for men. But at the Berlin Film Festival, GirlsWhoLikePorno opened their workshop to anyone who considers themselves interested in “queer sex.”

“I want to see hot women feeling hot,” one workshop participant said, when asked what was missing from most porn she’d seen so far.

GirlsWhoLikePorno screened 12 short films that challenge how women are portrayed within mainstream porn, from an inverted “homemaker” fantasy to “fuck gender fantasies on the beach,” to an orgy scene where everyone was wearing a large garbage bag over their heads that masked all but legs. Many of the films were created during past workshops.

While the GirlsWhoLikePorno films were made almost exclusively with women, Female Fantasies and Sexual Sushi by director Petra Joy were two films screened at the festival that were oriented towards women and involved straight, gay and pansexual sex.

While ultimately post porn wouldn’t categorize “female” or “male” fantasy, Petra Joy’s films make headway in that they take real fantasies sent to her by women and illustrate them in porn, unlike most porn that fulfills heterosexual male desire.

“I’m really bored with seeing male fantasies,” said Joy. “I want to see things that turn me and my girlfriends on.” In her films, those things include heterosexual and homosexual couples having intimate sex, bisexual men having sex with each other and then smothering one woman, and large group sex. The presence of bisexual men at all, explained Joy, is a big no-no in mainstream porn.

The actors Joy uses are not porn stars and they don’t have false boobs. The scenes are meant to feel genuine, creative and intimate. “I want to bring romance and intimacy back into porn,” Joy said, which may be the reason why she’s had so much difficulty stocking her films in licensed sex shops. As Joy explained, many women (and men) who walk into sex shops are immediately turned off by videos whose covers show women drenched in cum. But storeowners argue that Female Fantasies just won’t sell.

Perhaps one of the more controversial films shown at the film festival, because, ironically, it might not be transgressive enough, was Girls Lie by director Eon Mckai. McKai has spearheaded the alt-porn movement and the Vivid-Alt imprint, a union with mainstream porn giant Vivid that is set to challenge what adult porn can look like.

What makes Girls Lie alternative is presumably that the storyline is compelling, even emotional, and deals with real-life urban dilemmas, like addiction and making it on the streets, for today’s tattooed and pierced X-Generation. But what had some viewers upset is that the (slim, young) girls don’t always appear to be getting off and each sex scene ends with a facial cum shot.

When an audience member stood up after the screening and angrily asked, “Why exactly should I care about this porn as a woman?” actress Charlotte confirmed that she “had an orgasm many times” while making the film and it was her favorite film she’d ever made.

Eon McKai went on to explain that in order for his porn to fall under the “hardcore” category, he had to include eight sex scenes—and, while McKai agreed it might be sexist, sex scenes are defined as visual male orgasm.

“It’s just my preference that the cum shot happens on the girl’s face,” McKai said.

One simply can’t argue with personal taste, or the fact that sometimes “mainstream” tricks still turn many people on. And this may be the end-all-be-all for porn filmmakers: No matter how transgressive or political post porn viewers would like to be, what matters is ultimately what makes viewers hot.

Thankfully, Berlin’s First Porn Film Festival proved that if you don’t see something out there that turns you on—or represents the kind of sex you have—post porn invites each of us to make our own porn. In doing so, diverse, underground porn will thrive.