Damon and Hunter do it
Director Tony Comstock can’t understand why the Australian censors would want to ban his documentary Damon And Hunter: Doing It Together from appearing in Queer Screen’s queerDOC festival.
Sure, it features explicit shots of two men having anal sex, oral sex and masturbating. But, Comstock argues, it’s sex between a real couple.
There’s no one telling a pair of actors what to do, as in other films with real sex which have made it to the big screen, such as 2004’s 9 Songs (which had its X rating reduced on appeal to R).
Typically the kind of films that get banned in Australia are very dark. Films like Ken Park and Baise-moi. Films that are not nice, Comstock told Sydney Star Observer from his home in New York.
That’s one reason I make these films. I want to show you can make a very serious film about sex that’s nice, and doesn’t have to include some father giving his son a blowjob.
I don’t want to see that. There’s enough ugliness in the world. I want to make films about sex that are genuinely grown-up.
Other documentaries he’s made which featured violence and death had received positive responses, he said, yet showing two people who love each other making love, which is an incredible part of being a human being -¦ and we’re fucking criminal.
Damon And Hunter is one in a series of documentaries by Comstock about real couples having real sex. Others in the series feature a lesbian couple and heterosexual couples.
Each of the films contains an interview with the couple about their relationship, and then we see the pair having sex.
At the insistence of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification, the explicit sex will have to be cut out of Damon And Hunter if it is to be screened at queerDOC. But the full X-rated version is already available here on DVD.
The two stars of Damon And Hunter had previously appeared in porn movies and understood what Comstock was trying to achieve from the get-go.
They were sophisticated and charming and intelligent and very good-looking. More importantly they did all those little things that show they care about each other in the interview. The way they interrupted each other with a hand on the shoulder, or on the leg, he said.
It’s that interview that creates the characters and it’s their relationship that creates the plot of the film.
The edited version of Damon And Hunter: Doing It Together is expected to screen on Tuesday 12 September and Wednesday 13 September at Dendy Newtown. For more information visit the Queer Screen website.
Link: Censor may lift doco ban
