QUEER PORN STUDIO AORTA FILMS ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT WRITTEN BY AUTHOR CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Award-winning queer writer featured as studio’s inaugural “Induction Series” guest artist
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 24, 2023
Contact: Inara Tayao-Lucero
inara@inara.agency
NEW YORK, May 24, 2023 – Award-winning, queer author Carmen Maria Machado will collaborate with indie queer porn studio AORTA films as the writer of a not yet titled multifaceted project as part of the studio’s “Induction Series.” Premiering as a collection, the project will include one central erotic short film as well as three expanded, pornographic cuts of the film’s pivotal scenes.
When the resident of an apartment reports a haunting, a team of ghost hunters arrive ready to record the unquiet spirit—or debunk its existence. There’s Sam, the introvert who’s more interested in being behind the camera than in front of it; June, the skeptic who refuses to play nice; and Jane, the brash ringleader of the crew who happens to share an ex with one of them. It’s a tense situation, made more so by the presence of a trickster spirit with a few mind-games up their sleeves. But no one is prepared for the gratification that comes from being held in the camera’s gaze, or letting down your defenses, or opening up for an adversary—and the intensely pleasurable revelations that will follow.
To support the production, AORTA films will launch a crowdfunding campaign this October with plans to shoot in early 2024, and a premiere scheduled for Fall 2024. Backers will receive early access to the project’s films as well as related rewards and artifacts.
Known for her bestselling memoir In the Dream House and short stories Her Body and Other Parties, Machado is welcomed as the first artist featured in the studio’s “Induction Series”, a project inviting brilliant thinkers, makers and doers from adjacent fields into the queer porn underground as honored guest collaborators.
AORTA films’ newest program, the Induction Series, is designed to ignite larger conversations about the role of queer pornography as a cultural instigator, media of merit and art form of significance. Inductees are encouraged to bring their unique understandings of sex, identity and pleasure to the creation of these projects.
On her decision to collaborate with AORTA films and create pornography, Machado shares, “I have always been drawn to genres ripe with capacity for subversion. Horror is one of them. Porn—especially queer porn—is another. Both have space for lushness, humor, and perversion – not to mention serving as a mirror for our fears and our desires. It makes absolute sense to bring the two of them together, and I am so thrilled to do that with AORTA films.”
AORTA’s Creative Director Mahx Capacity describes the program’s intent: “Indie porn as a formal media has so much to bring to the world; through this program, we hope to expand the cultural understanding of what porn can be, not just for queer people, but for everyone. The idea that porn is immoral, unethical or has to forsake identifying as pornography to gain cultural value is outdated. Our work is powerful precisely because of its explicit erotic charge. In partnering with visionary artists, we’re engaging in intentional conversations around pornography’s formal, artistic, and cultural capabilities – both internally within our creative process and externally with the public.”
In addition to presale through the crowdfunding project, the “Induction Series” will also be available through the AORTA films website, which streams exclusively for members. All-access membership starts at $8 per month (billed annually) and includes access to over 80 films, a semi-annual film festival, as well as the studio’s “Community Hardcore” queer clip library. For more information, visit www.aortafilms.com/induction.
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AORTA films is an internationally award-winning queer/trans indie porn studio creating explicit, experimental queer cinema: lusty, opulent, ethical fuckery. Led by Creative Director Mahx Capacity (they/them), AORTA films produces short films & long-term features, as well as innovative programming including a queer clip library, a semi-annual film festival, and workshops. The studio is best known for their work creating innovative, cinematic, sex-positive porn featuring performers across a diverse range of identities, bodies, and genders. AORTA’s first feature “(W/HOLE)” won Best Film at the Vienna Porn Film Festival and Hacker Porn Film Festival in 2019, and six of their short films have won Best Short at festivals around the world.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, among many others. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”