GIRL ON FILM

For a film with as fascinating and nuanced a vision of the adult film industry as Pleasure, it’s hard to believe that its director Ninja Thyberg once wanted to ban porn altogether. “I started as a very angry and radical anti-porn activist, ” says Thyberg. “When I was 16 and I saw my first porn film I had a very intense feeling that I had to do something about it.”

As the years went by and Thyberg went on to study gender at university, her interest in the industry didn’t wane. “I wrote essays and I did studies measuring the different things in porn online and became very interested in the real people behind the stereotypes.” Thyberg then left academia and became a filmmaker; in 2013, one of her first shorts, set behind the scenes of a porn shoot, played at Cannes. It became the basis of her feature debut Pleasure, which premiered at Sundance almost a decade later and was met with acclaim for being provocative, riveting and timely.

When the short transitioned into a feature, the story changed, and it now follows Bella Cherry, a Swedish 19-year-old freshly arrived in Hollywood. She tells the immigration official that she has come for “pleasure” but the lines between pleasure and business are blurred as she dreams of becoming the