NEW YORK CITY—Self-described "queer indie porn studio" AORTA Films will relaunch on Wednesday, April 15, adfter having been down for a brief hiatus, and will resume its monthly subscription-based releases through its site, AORTAfilms.com. The small, award-winning studio took a break after the departure of two of its co-founders, Parts Authority and Ginny Woolf, this past October, but will reopen with third co-founder Mahx Capacity now at its helm as Creative Director. In addition to resuming its monthly production of short films, AORTA Films is marking its relaunch with the announcement of a range of innovative new programming, including festivals, guest artists, workshops, and commercial collaborations.
Founded in 2015, Brooklyn-based studio AORTA Films' work centers on performers across a wide range of bodies and identities. Hailing from queer BDSM community and experimental performance contexts, the studio works collaboratively, prioritizing safe and enthusiastically consensual working processes, and describing its work as "lusty, opulent, glorious fuckery." The studio's films have been presented at festivals, galleries, and museums across the USA, South America, and Europe. Most recently, AORTA won Best International Short Film for its short film Full, about fat-femme-for-fat-femme desire at the Hacker Porn Film Festival in 2018, and Best Feature Film (Hacker Porn Film Festival, Rome) and Best Film - Fiction (Vienna Porn Film Festival) for its first feature film (W/HOLE) in 2019, which had been additionally selected as the opening or closing film at four festivals.
Upcoming short film titles include bad-babysitter roleplay Teen Angels starring Garnet Lake, Roxanne Drip, and Ze Royale; masc4masc wrestling scene Fucking Loser starring Bud Lite and Jamie Joy; femme fisting and squirting scene "Rough Lust" staring Courtney Trouble and Mahx Capacity; sureal fantasy Portal starring Royale and Joy; campfire orgy and fireplay scene "Kindling" starring Drip, Joy, Royale, and Lake joined by Ero Rose; and "Romance Isn't Dead," a kill-room date-night scene starring Rose, Lake, Lite, and Drip.
As part of the relaunch, AORTA Films is also premiering its new commercial endeavor, AORTAx. Commercial work-for-hire collaborations with sex- and sexuality-focused projects, AORTAx will create dynamic erotic content for films, brands, music videos, fashion campaigns, commercials, and more. While the full film won't premiere until June 2020, this April's launch sees the release of trailers, stills, and behind-the-scenes footage for AORTAx's first project "Hogtied," a music video for LA industrial band CONTRACULT Collective's first single (Roadrunner Records).
Upcoming festival BEDDED, which will have its first iteration in June 2020, will feature three curated short films from international makers, to be announced soon. Designed to share the wealth and variety of all the independent queer porn being created right now, BEDDED offers a curated selection of films that AORTA thinks shouldn't be missed. This semi-annual, watch-at-home queer porn film festival celebrates the work of domestic and international makers who expand the limits of the queer indie-porn genre with their incredible work.
Additional programs AORTA Induction and AORTA_ITF have been created to connect with top talent and everyday viewers respectively. AORTA Induction invites brilliant thinkers, makers, and doers from adjacent fields into the queer porn underground. Welcomed as honored guest collaborators, "Inductees" are asked to bring their unique and compelling understandings of sex, pleasure, identity, and embodiment to the creation of a new short film; the first induction artist will be announced later this year. AORTA_ITF, or "In The Flesh", is a collection of events and offerings designed to "pull queer porn out of the digital ether and get it back in viewers' bodies." Offering workshops, talks, screenings, events, and more, ITF offers participants a variety of ways to explore embodiment as part of their personal porn, pleasure, and body liberation practices.
Co-founder and Creative Director Mahx Capacity stated, "When we founded AORTA Films in 2015, we were developing our work through exploration. Finding an audience that was hungry for inventive queer porn allowed us to expand and explore our vision. We couldn't be more thrilled to enter into AORTA's future with an ambitious set of new programs and a packed lineup of hot new films. We sincerely hope that our films and programming can offer viewers some distraction and joy during difficult times, and continue to celebrate the queer capacity for embodied, radical pleasure."
AORTA Films manages its subscribers through crowdfunding site Patreon.com. Monthly memberships start at $9/month for full access to its library of more than 50 short films, and offer additional perks at higher levels. More info at AORTAfilms.com.
