>From director Tony Comstock comes news that his latest documentary, Damon & Hunter, which mixes a couple’s engaging and intimate interview with scenes of them having sex, has met with the ire of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification and is not to be played in its original form during queerDOC 06, the Sydney-based documentary festival.
After playing to a sell-out crowd and sharing a prize for best documentary at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Damon & Hunter was booked into two screening slots at queerDOC.
Subsequently, though, queerDOC was notified that because Damon & Hunter carries an X classification in Australia, exhibition of the documentary would violate Section 8 of the OFLC’s Film Festival Guidelines and cannot be screened publicly. queerDOC has since applied for an exemption to the ruling and Tony has scrambled to provide them with a heavily edited version of his documentary.
Since we’ve been fortunate enough to have Damon & Hunter among the many fine works under consideration for this year’s CineKink NYC, we were a little curious to see how much of the wonderfully sumptuous piece might remain after the explicit sex – “…no erect penises, no touching of each other’s flacid penises, and no butt cracks” – had been excised.
Fortunately, Tony has posted the abridged version for online viewing.
It’s a pretty quick download.
>Hello Cinekink.
The OFLC rejected the edit that I did because of the phrase ‘Footage Removed by Order of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification’ was included in the black-out slate covering the sexual footage.
They also cautioned that I should “tread lightly” and keep it “factual and accurate” in any director’s statement as to the reasons the film was changed.
I think we’re done in Sydney.