Pain Mania

A strippers' convention and a major contest. The movie focuses on a few strippers, each with her own strong motive to win.

Published in Paris in 1954, Story of O was an immediate bestseller and literary scandal: an elegantly written S&M fantasy that had all the hallmarks of being an autobiographical account by the pseudonymous Pauline Réage. In 1994 Dominique Aury, a mild-mannered, dowdy editor for France’s prestigious Gallimard press, revealed her authorship. Pola Rapaport explores Aury's inspiration, recreating the world of '50s literary Paris and setting it against dramatic sequences that bring the infamous book to life. The author as well as various French intellectuals expound on the thorny relationship between sexuality and power, submission and freedom, liberation and non-being.

The story of Robert Flanagan, a man who was born with cystic fibrosis and told he wouldn't live past 20, who through a unique odyssey of masochism, art and love found a way to live decades past his expiration date.

Graphic Sexual Horror takes a peek behind the terrifying facade behind the most notorious of bondage websites, exploring the dark mind of its artistic creator and asking hard questions about personal responsibility. Interviews reveal deep fascinations with bondage and sadomasochism that run parallel, and in fact become irreversibly entwined with the lure of money.

Nick Broomfield and a documentary crew visit Pandora's Box, an up-scale house of bondage on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, where clients pay $175 an hour to be subservient to mistresses. Mistresses talk about their craft; a few clients, usually masked, are interviewed as well. Then, the camera watches sessions organized around fetishes: rubber, wrestling, corporal punishment, masochism, and infantilism. Mistress Raven, the owner of Pandora's Box, explains that pain need not be part of the subservient experience: it is, at its root, a transfer of power. After their session has ended, clients talk about how drained, relaxed, relieved, and at peace they are.

Documentary about the subculture of people interested in consensual sadomasochistic erotic play. The scene wants to be accepted like homosexual people are. Professional Dominatrix "Lady Isis", bondage-artist and publisher of magazine "Schlagzeilen" Matthias Grimme, a stand up comedian focusing on the topic Axel Tueting, a composer of session-music Carlos Peron, writer and artist Woschofius are interviewed.

The film documents modern slave trade through a number of African countries, under dictatorship rule. The filming was conducted both in public places, and sometimes with the use of hidden cameras, for high impact scenes of nudity, sex, and violence - and a few surprises, as slaves made out of peregrins to Asia, and slave traders paid in traveller checks.

Caroline Darian, Gisèle Pelicot's daughter, looks back on the tragedy that shook her family: for ten years, her father drugged her mother to subject her to rapes committed by strangers recruited on the Internet. This case exposes the scandal of chemical submission, a practice where attackers, generally close to the victims, use prescription or over-the-counter medications to commit their crimes. This phenomenon, far from being marginal, affects victims with varied profiles...

An exploration of underground Japanese counter-culture including the Yakuza, the nationalists, the gay and lesbian community, the bikers and the homeless.

A bondage master and his model at work.