My Friend the Porn Star

Playing with the blurred lines between reality and artifice, this documentary begins as a depiction of the making of a porn film and evolves into an exploration of the spectrum of eroticism and gender diversity.

Director
Rosa Friedrich
Country
Austria
Languages
German
Subtitles
English
Age limit
K16
Duration
94 min
Keywords
Sex, Female stories, LGBTQIA+, Media, Filmmaking

Rosa Friedrich toys with the blurry line between real and artificial, combining fiction and obscured “reality” in her docufiction piece My Friend the Porn Star. The film follows Friedrich’s friend Timo on his journey to become a porn star and filmmaker. When Timo suddenly abandons the project just before its completion, Friedrich takes matters into her own hands, anonymising Timo using AI and gathering a colourful crowd to share their relationship with the erotic with her ever watching camera.

Mentions of pornography are bound to raise some disapproving eyebrows, but the film itself presents a sympathetic examination of the paradoxical desire that has plagued mankind for all eternity: the simultaneous need to be hidden and to be watched (or seen?). What do we show even when we try to hide it? What will remain hidden no matter how hard we try to show it? And which parts of it all are real and which mere performance? As we are made real through others’ perception of us, the film urges the viewer to consider the power they wield through their gaze.

Anna Jolma (translated by Adrian Murtomäki)

Screenings

  • Kino Regina
    Fri 18.9. at 17.15–18.49
    94 min, 1/4
  • Kino Töölö
    Sat 19.9. at 15.00–16.34
    94 min, 2/4
  • Cinema Orion
    Fri 25.9. at 20.45–22.19
    94 min, 3/4
  • Kino Regina
    Sun 27.9. at 18.00–19.34
    94 min, 4/4
Year
2026
Original name
Mein Freund der Pornostar
Distributor
New Docs
Links

Trailer