 Swedish female directors seeking to create lesbian and feminist pornography shorts can use their mobile phones to shoot scenes that will become part of a Swedish Film Institute collection entitled Dirty Diaries. Experienced feminist documentary filmmaker and Stockholm native, Mia Engberg, is set to receive US$59,300 (350,000 Kronor) in subsidies for this ambitious $76,200 project whose only two rules are that all participants must be over 18 years of age and that no harm can be done to them.
Mia Engberg is known for such alternative films as the gender-bending San Francisco documentary, Manhood (1999), which explores what it's like "to be a woman and then become a man when you live together with a dyke that might actually be a gay man." In 2001, Engberg filmed the 18 minute short, Selma & Sofie, the first Swedish erotic film made only by women. Interestingly, she followed that up with Bitch & Butch in 2001, a 45 minute examination into whether it's possible to make feminist pornography. Perhaps we will never know why the examination of feminist pornography came after she had already made her first feminist porno, but it appears Engberg's not ready to throw in the towel on feminist adult films. In fact, the multi-talented director, who plays bass with hardcore feminist ska band, Vagina Grande, also helped to create an independent film company that produces and distributes queer erotic movies, Sexy Films.
Popular Swedish journalist and cultural critic, Fredrik Strage, says of the impact of Mia's films:
Her camera has captured vegans, skinheads, transsexuals, punks and squatters. Now she has been at the bathhouse in Vällingby and shot a
lesbian porn movie that is also a pretty adorable love story. Mia Engberg is not satisfied until she has crushed both capitalism and gender oppression. And she wants you to have better sex.
I'm sure Camille Paglia would be proud, but what do the folks who award Swedish tax payer film funds think of state-sponsored porn? Anne-Marie Söhrman Ferm, who is an adviser with the Swedish Film Institute, and who helped decide which short films would receive funding, had this to say of Dirty Diaries:
For me it’s an examination of erotic film from a totally different perspective; a feminist perspective. I think it's a very exciting project with clearly artistic ambitions.
Producers Mia Engberg and Goran Olsson are planning to release Dirty Diaries in the spring of 2009.
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