London Fetish Film Fest: Awards + call for 2024 submissions

LONDON FETISH FILM FEST: AWARDS + CALL FOR 2024 SUBMISSIONS

If you’re a budding or established filmmaker who has created work that fits broadly into the fetish genre, the annual London Fetish Film Festival (LFFF) provides an opportunity for you to showcase your work to a London audience and potentially win an LFFF award too! Since January, the festival organisers have been promoting their open international call for entries to the 2024 LFFF, which will take place this year on October 11-13. And as we publish this blog item, the Earlybird deadline for entries — Sunday May 26 — is about to expire. So if you’re a filmmaker with work that you want to submit for possible screening by the LFFF in October, you have at best just a couple of days to make your submission for what is currently the lowest entry fee. After May 26, entry fees rise in four further increments up to the final deadline for entries of September 22. Top image: UK’s Tessa Kuragi in Marc Blackie’s The Divine Right of Stagnation, which won her London Fetish Film Fest’s 2023 Best Performer Award Alice, above, by Martyna Maria Ludwig and Anna Maria Ryń, won a record three London Fetish Film Fest 2023 Awards: Best Director, Best Sound Design and Best Short Film If you’re not already familiar with the London Fetish Film Festival, it consists of screenings of international films and other related expressions of fetish culture. It aims to provide artists and audience with a context which showcases and promotes cinematic values, artwork, and artistic projects exploring fetish, kink, BDSM and erotic art, while encouraging and celebrating a collective reflection on freedom of expression. Last year’s LFFF, which we previewed in our December 15 Libidex Blog story London Fetish Film Festival: an alternative Christmas, was held later in the year than usual owing to circumstances beyond the control of organisers Venus Raven and Tainted Saint. Having to squeeze it into a two-night run at its regular venue, the Hen & Chickens Theatre, Highbury Corner, Islington on the weekend immediately before Christmas obliged its hosts to reschedule the LFFF 2023 Awards as a separate event in February this year, at the Bishopsgate Institute. The festival’s Awards are normally made in around a dozen categories. The films and artists honoured on February 14 by the awards listed below can be considered a useful guide, both for filmmakers and festival audiences, to the substantial range of treatments likely to float the organisers’ boat. Norma Place, above, by Guillaume Pin and Charlotte Grondin — a spin-off from their forthcoming documentary feature Beyond Bizarre, about artist John Willie — won two London Fetish Film Fest 2023 Awards: Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography

London Fetish Film Festival 2023 Awards

Best Director, Best Sound Design, Best Short Film:
ALICE (Martyna Maria Ludwig, Anna Maria Ryń) Festival Director’s Choice: IMPENETRABLE (Matthias von Braun) Yes It’s Fucking Political (new award): LUCA FEDERICI (for director Luca’s body of work) Best Documentary: POLISH KINK (Tomek Rustecki) Best Performer: TESSA KURAGI in The Divine Right of Stagnation (Marc Blackie) Polish Kink, above, by Tomek Rustecki, won the London Fetish Film Fest 2023 Award for Best Documentary Best Kink Moment: CAPSULE HOUSE pony ride (Lily Rinae) Fun Fetish: OHRWURM (abcde flash) Best Production Design: NAKED – BITE music video (Joseph Delaney) Best Art Direction: PLAGUE GOD – ABSENT IN BODY Best Edit: EVERY CARCASS LIKE A DIAMOND (favcolblk) Best Music Video: HEY BABY, THEATRE! (Kassandra Powell) Best Costume: JUST SAY IT (Miha) (Custom latex by Dayne Henderson) Best Screenplay + Best Cinematography: NORMA PLACE (Guillaume Pin and Charlotte Grondin) Hey Baby, Theatre! by Kassandra Powell won the London Fetish Film Fest 2023 Award for Best Music Video Audience tickets for the 2024 London Fetish Film Festival will go on sale closer to the October event, but the call to filmmakers to submit their work is open right now, and the sooner a film is entered for potential screening, the lower the entry fee. Whether you’re an established filmmaker in the genre or someone who has just created your first work, your film subject must be related to the themes addressed by the festival. Those themes, such as fetish, kink, BDSM, eroticism, sexuality, kink lifestyle, sex activism etc, may be explored through a diverse range of stories and cinematic languages ranging from drama to documentary, rampant camp comedy to arthouse experimental, mildly spicy to quite explicit. All applicants are invited to approach the themes in the most creative, innovative, irreverent and thought-provoking ways, unlocking taboos and stigmas about fetish culture to a wider public. The LFFF tends to focus on work released in the 12 months preceding each annual festival and it has become established as an occasion for genre world premières. For example, the 2023 festival hosted four world premieres: Boys (Donald C Shorter, USA); Decadance (Morgana Mayer, Italy); ImageThunder — When Ataraxi Sets In (Swen Brandy aka Carnivore, Germany); and The Divine Right of Stagnation (Marc Blackie, UK). For full details of how to submit a work — including the fees for different submission categories and deadlines — visit the London Film Festival page at FilmFreeway.com. More information about 2023’s award winners can be found at the LFFF’s Instagram page here. More London Fetish Film Fest 2023 winners, clockwise from top left: Impenetrable (Matthias von Braun) – Festival Director’s Choice; Naked – Bite (Joseph Delaney) – Best Production Design; Just Say It (Miha) – Best Costume; Capsule House (Lily Rinae) – Best Kink Moment