Halo-8 Acquires Award-Winning Alt-porn Documentary

Los Angeles, Calif.—Halo-8 Entertainment has secured worldwide distribution rights to The New Erotic, award-winning filmmaker Ramzi Abed's documentary on the erotic-art/alt-porn movement. The documentary features alternative-XXX filmmakers Eon McKai (Girls Lie), Kimberly Kane (Live in My Secrets), Vena Virago (Eastside Story), Dave Naz (Skater Girl Fever), Jack the Zipper (Blacklight Beauty), and erotic photographers Alejandra Guerrero (Corporate Vampire) and Ed Fox (Glamour From the Ground Up).

The deal marks Halo-8's third collaboration with Abed, after 2008's erotic-horror The Devil's Muse and the psychedelic-horror In a Spiral State, which comes to DVD on Sept. 29. Halo-8 has slated The New Erotic for a limited theatrical run followed by a DVD release in early 2010.

"Ramzi Abed has created this generation's Decline of Western Civilization with his thoughtful and provocative look at the erotic-auteurs creating transgressive, countercultural art in a field primarily known for exploitation," said Matt Pizzolo, president of Halo-8.

"Unlike most filmmakers on either side of the Hollywood Hills, the artists Ramzi focuses on are young, risk-taking visionaries who are creating startlingly new and daringly confrontational visual stories that evoke a brash sensibility unique to the internet-generation," Pizzolo added. "These creators are every bit as fresh and dangerous as the punk pioneers profiled in Penelope Spheeris' classic."

"I'm ecstatic about Halo-8's confidence in my vision as a filmmaker and their upcoming release of The New Erotic, which is the first and only documentary I've ever directed," Abed said. "It's a great feeling knowing that I have their support on such an exciting and unique project. I admire Halo-8's commitment to distributing cinematic art, and am very proud to have them in my subversive court."

The New Erotic focuses on the fearless erotic artists working in the so-called "alt-porn" scene, where punks, gallery artists and visual designers create edgy, pornographic films that fly in the face of conventional eroticism and redefine beauty. Renaming themselves after punk heroes and serial killers, they eschew the previous generation of cosmetically enhanced professional porn stars, instead filming their naturally figured, mostly non-blonde hipster friends in a unique style that borrows its edge from NYC's Cinema of Transgression and mashes it up against a mumblecore aesthetic with a post-Suicide-Girls/post-American-Apparel sensibility.

Ramzi Abed is an award-winning filmmaker whose narrative work centers on themes of taboo-breaking, self-destructive youth-on-the-edge—a cinematic style that makes him uniquely suited to document such passionate and unhinged artists. Abed's upcoming psychedelic-horror feature film, In a Spiral State, focuses on the flawed artists, frauds, drug addicts, suicidal actresses and murderous femmes fatales in the underbelly of Los Angeles. It comes to DVD courtesy of Halo-8 on Sep 29.