The Toronto Star is the biggest daily newspaper in Canada, and was described to me as "family friendly".
Journalist Linda Barnard told me she started watching the film several times, and had to stop due to feeling too uncomfortable to continue.
It wasn't until her third try (starting all over from the beginning each time) that she was able to make it through.
But she still got it, and had many good questions, even though they didn't all make it into the article.

There is a much larger audience here in Toronto, and it is the first time we are meeting people that did have a hard time sitting through the film. People that came to see it voluntarily, that is, not counting the poor Waldorf parents that got traumatized by the earliest cuts.
Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell in the Toronto Star
Linda Barnard
Movies Editor

Graphic Sexual Horror almost dares you to watch, assaulting eyes from its opening frames with violent images of moaning, crying women, bound, tortured and terrorized in ways that defy description.

The documentary, written and directed by fledgling filmmakers Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell, explores the now-shuttered website Insex and its P.T. Barnum-like founder, an artist and former Carnegie Mellon professor known as PD, who started Insex in 1997.

"I always wonder how much effect PD's website has on reality shows, like Survivor or something like that," said Bell. "Putting people in extreme situations and watching how they react is what the live Insex feeds were about."

The filmmakers are working on a distribution deal for Graphic Sexual Horror.

"It has been amazingly positive," Lorentzon said of the Hot Docs' crowd reaction to the movie.

"They were perceptive and things we weren't sure they were going to notice, they did," added Lorentzon. "We didn't want to take sides, we just wanted to put things out there."

Filmgoers lined up around the block for a midnight screening at the Bloor Theatre Tuesday. It screens again tomorrow at 9:45 p.m. at the Innis Town Hall, with a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Lorentzon, who worked as a producer for Insex, and Bell, a novelist, use footage from the torture site, which at one time had 35,000 members. It's a stupefying display of women – trussed up or caged, gagged and blindfolded –being pushed to their limits of endurance as PD exposes them to increasing tortures.

The models, who could earn thousands of dollars for live feeds and elaborate, hours-long S&M sessions, speak matter-of-factly to the camera about why they became involved. They explain how empowered they felt at not resorting to using their "safe word" to stop the ever-escalating scenarios.

The most compelling interviews are the post-shoot chats with models, seen minutes before screaming in fear and pain, now appearing calm, almost happy.

"We made a conscious decision (not to have a narrator)," Bell explained. "We wanted it to be about the people that were involved, talking about what it was like to be there. So you really saw the humanity or the human experience directly involved, to make these people very human rather than ideas."

The pair say they felt compelled to make Graphic Sexual Horror.

"All we could talk about was just how crazy everything was at the Insex studio," Lorentzon says.

Insex shut down in 2005 after the Department of Homeland Security determined porn was being used to fund terrorism and credit card companies dropped the site.

Original source
http://www.thestar.com/article/630274