Barbara Bell’s acclaimed novel, Stacking in Rivertown, purchased and edited by Michael Korda, editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, was released in 2000, subsequently released in Australia and Israel. “Brutal yet beautiful. . .this disturbing, impressive novel introduces an urgent and powerful new voice.” Publisher’s Weekly
Barbara is currently working on a screenplay for their next feature film.

Anna Lorentzon

Anna Lorentzon, originally a photographer, worked as a video producer for many years, and is currently making a documentary about building an eco house in Sweden.

Directors' statement:

Barbara:

I don't think that anyone expected the internet to become a vehicle for delivering porn into every home that has a computer. And so-called "violent" porn has exploded. Politicians love to use it as a whipping boy for all the ills of society - male aggression, dysfunctional families, godlessness, ad nauseum. But next to no one has ever gone behind the scenes and documented the phenomenon in a serious fashion. So to have the opportunity to go inside Insex, one of the most infamous of the American bondage porn websites, was a rare opportunity. I wanted to show the real people who worked there, who, by the way, may well be your nice, friendly next-door neighbor. Or your own daughter. In fact, the people and the milieu in the Insex studio were fascinating, continually taking me by surprise.

In making this film about such an unpopular subject, both Anna and I agreed that we wanted to paint an accurate picture of what we saw. We did not want to sway our audience to a particular point of view. Several people that screened for us found this to be unnerving. They wanted to be told what to think.

Another structural problem we faced was that PD's imagery is so strong that we had to be very careful about how, what, and when we presented stills and clips from his videos. We felt we had to give an accurate picture of his work without losing our audience in the first five minutes.

Coming at this project as a writer, I had to learn a tremendous amount about working with image. Anna and I edited side by side, my first-ever collaborative project. And we never killed one another! The entire time we worked on GSH, we kept telling each other that everyone was going to hate the documentary and hate us for making it. But we both felt driven to make it anyway. I think there's tremendous value in seeing the reality of a thing rather than making assumptions and acting on fabricated information. Yet the longer we worked on this documentary, the more we understood that the dilemmas and difficulties that these individuals faced at Insex were the exact same dilemmas faced by everyone everyday. If you need the money to pay bills, can you say no? What happens to the line of consent when large amounts of money are involved? How far will you go to make your business succeed? When are you going to give up blaming someone else and take responsibility for your own life?

This project was so filled with fascinating material that Anna and I had a hard time keeping the focus narrow and concise. There's still so much to explore in this strange microcosm. But I hope that we were able to put together a piece that will hang on in the mind, and that it speaks deeply to something much more important than morality and sex and whether a thing is porn or art. I hope that it brings us to question our motives, our needs as opposed to our desires and fears, and what it is that gives us pause – so that we can let go some of the excess baggage that we all carry.