MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Following up on its New York debut this past summer, the documentary Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm will make its West Coast premiere in Mill Valley's October Film Festival.
Screenings are scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday in the Smith Rafael Center and 2:15 p.m. Oct. 13 at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre.
Based on the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines, the documentary, which has become known as "the vibrator movie," was a labor of love by Bay Area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori. The cast includes two feminist pioneers: Maines and a homemaker who was arrested for selling vibrators at a private party in Texas. The film has a "kind of tongue-in-cheek homespun look to it with Victorian-style, floral-patterned graphic designs by Ellen Blonder," according to the Marin Independent Journal.
The documentary follows Maines' lead in recounting how vibrators initially were used by physicians to cure female "hysteria" and that early models were sold by companies such as General Electric and Sears.
"One looks like a little cement mixer," Slick said. "Another resembles a toy truck. When we read [Maines'] book, we were stunned. We're feminists [and] we're involved in women's issues, but we had no idea about any of this stuff. Women in my baby-boomer age group don't really know about this history. We never really thought about it."
The film's creation began with women in Slick's exercise class in Mill Valley banding together to raise financing to buy the rights to the book. With a $200,000 budget, Slick and Omori completed the film over the course of seven years, which allowed them to include current events, such as a case of a Texas woman who was arrested for breaking a state law by owning more than six vibrators.
"It's really about women's rights," Slick told the Marin Independent Journal. "It's about who we are and how we've been treated. Even though we've been told in this country how we should think about ourselves, how we should look, how we should feel, even how we should have orgasms, the message of this movie is that we have to get back our self-esteem and define who we are ourselves. In that sense, women are feeling empowered by it."
For tickets and more information, visit MVFF.com.
