Hi @menkesfilm, I'm looking at the controversy around CUTIES and I watched an interview with the extremely articulate, feminist director, and I thought of you because the problem people seem to be having with the film is the "shot design."

In other words, there is a disconnect between the message that the director says she wants to convey and the way the camera sexualizes the bodies of the young girls. It's quite fascinating and great material for your documentary!

It made me think about my movie VIVA, which also uses overly sexualized images to stimulated discussion. But I deliberately made choices to subvert the voyeurism - such as making the nudist scene as unsexy as possible, casting hairy older men, people with regular bodies, etc.

In my case it's not that I use shot design in any unusual way - it's more about the casting, the script, etc. But the CUTIES controversy is interesting in how it's directly about those particular tools of filmmaking and how they're used (or misused).

Also in both VIVA and THE LOVE WITCH I withhold the nudity of the lead actress for the scenes where everyone else is nude, reversing the exploitation convention in which ONLY the lead actress is habitually nude.

I think if you're trying to make a feminist film you have to be extremely careful with all of your choices, especially surrounding female sexuality. Interesting that this is the first time the general public has caught on to the discrepancy between intention and execution.

And yet even with VIVA, the main people who seem to be still renting it on Amazon are people who also rent Japanese softcore porn. I was too naive to know that would happen. The CUTIES director was also naive when she felt that people would be identifying with the young girls.

She didn't think that people could be so disgusting as to objectify these girls and not feel for their journey. But what I discovered is that many people just want to get off on nudity and they don't care what the message is. So you have to be very careful with your camera.

She clearly thought that since she relates to these girls, sees them as herself, and has only love for them (and maybe a little consternation) when she sees them dance, that everyone else would be like her and see their female journey. That's where she was naive.