We decided early on that we wanted to focus on sex and the reputation and connotations it has. As we began research, and throwing out ideas, there were a few, more focused, points regarding sex, from how it is taught, to how it is perceived in general society and the media, to how it can be both stigmatised and praised at the same time. This points all came up through our own personal stories regarding our experiences with it, as well as stories we knew from our friends. Some of the stories were positive, whilst others were negative, some people had lots of experience and were open to discuss, others had little to no experience and had little to discuss. But one of the overarching themes of these stories, stories that we had accumulated across various cultural backgrounds and different moments in our lives, was how little it was talked about. It is a major, serious part of everyone’s lives, but you just didn’t talk about it, which could lead to some major problems with misinformation, stigmatisation, and etiquette. So we decided to focus on getting open conversations happening in a tongue-in-cheek way.
The biggest difficultly for ‘it’ was simply getting across the ideas and thoughts of our interviewees without actually using any precise words, however, by only alluding to the topic. Then attempting to pair up visuals that are wordplays on what have been said was also hard. Finding appropriate props and movements, then fitting it into the allotted time space on the soundtrack made filming very interesting but also a lot of fun.
We experimented with documentary form by never directly mentioning sex, the topic of our documentary. We did this to criticise the censorship of sex in media and society which often leaves people uneducated and misinformed on the topic. Banning buzzwords around the topic of sex forces the viewer to piece together the dialogue to fill in the holes, causing them to think about and engage with the film. The message comes from ambiguity, and whether those watching find it humorous or frustrating that all taboo words and imagery are avoided, it draws attention to the fact that sex is continuously censored, from which comes our stance. It forces the viewer to see it as ridiculous – a film about sex that never mentions sex? But that’s a reflection of society, and so in our final film, it was not so much a question of how do we make this political as well as poetic, but how could we not?
