BME: Body Modification Ezine

What was the process of you coming to make this film?

I started research in 2019, but I was talking to one of my friends about the project, who I’ve known for 20 years, also a fellow kinkster and he was like, ‘I think this one has really been in progress for 20 years.’ Which may be true, because I met Fakir in this community in 2003, and that started expanding my ideas as an artist, but also around what was possible with the body. But it wasn’t until 2019 where I actually started working in the archive.

I had just finished a huge project, a feature film, that had done pretty well, and I was like, ‘What do I want for my next big project?’ Historically, I do like working within my friendships and communities I’m already a part of. That has always felt good to me and I’ve often used my film projects as a way to deepen or enrich pre-existing connections. A couple of years ago, I made a documentary about my two friends that started a bar that became a really amazing community space for rural and queer folks. I like to find ways to kind of support people I already care about or things I’m already interested in. I’m not the kind of filmmaker that goes looking for something interesting. I have plenty of interesting things at my fingertips, so I stayed pretty close to home.

I knew that Fakir’s work had not really been considered outside of the fetish world, and because I’m kind of in the art world and kind of in the film world — and then also, of course, have my private life — I was like, ‘I want this artwork to be thought about as artwork in the art world, not just relegated to the fetish world or the framework of erotica.’ That was really the motivating factor for me, primarily.

My primary focus and interest was in the still images. The photographs were where I really started, and I think where I kind of stayed. Obviously, I got really interested in the archival video as well, but the film was really formally rooted and shaped visually by the photographs. And then I spent a couple of years in the archive, and it was during COVID. So we had a few setbacks to production, we had two different shoots canceled, which was a real bummer, but we forged ahead and finished. It was the longest edit I’ve ever done, a 13-month long edit, which was really long for me, but it premiered in 2025 at the True/False Film Festival, a little over a year ago. So from the 2019 inception to release, six years.

The time you spent in editing really shows in the final project, I think. It feels really cohesive.

Thank you. Like I said, I’m not totally beholden to biography, right? I’m interested in ideas about the world. Allowing the material in the film to go the places that I’m most interested in as it relates to his work and his ideas is actually a lot more challenging than you might think, because the film does move chronologically. It moves from the beginning of his life to the end of his life, which is a pretty straightforward trajectory. But very rarely am I actually staying true to what was going on in his life during that time, right? I’m just using the framework of his life to help us all move through those sets of ideas that I do.

You had mentioned you were coming into this from the kink world, and I’m curious if you had any apprehension or challenges in covering the body mod side? It’s a distinction I’m interested in as I’m coming more from body mod, but Fakir was very much in the intersection.

I don’t really think too much about it. I’m also trans, and I wasn’t really thinking about it as coming from a trans perspective either, right? I’m trying to hold phenomenology as a key concept, so thinking about, like, ‘why are we alive?’, ‘how, when, and why do we do the things we do?’, ‘how do we understand ourselves in relationship with other people?’

I think your own sense of knowledge will always have limitations and benefits. In this film, as I’m not someone deep in the body mod community, I’m sure there’s lots of questions people in the body mod community have that are not going to be addressed in this film. And I think there’s lots of questions in this film that people in the art world still have that are also not going to be addressed. I think it’s really a starting point to unravel the intricacies and overlaps of this person’s interests and his philosophies, and where those things overlap in lots of different kinds of communities. The film really stays rooted in the history, it kind of stops after 1990 right? It’s kind of done in terms of historical analysis, right. And part of that is because there’s so much, there’s so many interviews where Fakir talks about suspension culture, his critiques of suspension culture. There’s so much that could be part of this conversation that’s adjacent and circling this figure. It was really difficult to make judgments around that. And I think for me, the way I zero in on information is what resonates with me most deeply, and I try to run with whatever I feel closest to and what speaks to me. 

 Personally, I have experience with faerie culture, so diving into how Fakir’s history overlaps with faerie culture was very interesting to me. And that’s an area that people might not have gone to in their minds. I think the limits of our knowledge and interests will shape anything, and I also don’t love going into places that I’m not already part of, I don’t love, like, sort of ethnographic games, I guess. For me, it’s more important to speak from the places that I know best, because I feel more comfortable speaking from what I know.

Right, and I see how that allows for deeper exploration than if you’re just parachuting in for a project.

I know you had a lot of archival material to review. How did you go about narrowing down what you wanted to use?

I really had to just do the thing they say in the movies: kill your darlings. Kill so many darlings. I did just have to be really honest with myself about what was supporting the trajectory of the film versus what was something I just really loved. As the structural framework of the film narrowed down and became clearer, things just naturally fell off. 

It is really, really challenging to cut things you’re in love with, but at the same time, I’m really committed to preserving the integrity of the film experience. The last thing I want is to be like, ‘this  is too long,’ because I hate that, personally, in films. I hate it when the film has like, four different endings, or when the editors and the directors couldn’t make decisions and couldn’t get outside of themselves enough to see what was good for the movie. So that’s a big deal for me. 

In terms of looking for moving images in the archive, I really gravitated to personal materials, because those are things that have this texture of intimacy built into them. Because they are personal, they’re not being shot for TV shows or talk shows or whatever. There’s so much footage of [Fakir] that’s on random TV shows, him on talk shows, him giving a lecture, and those are the things I’m less interested in. I’m more interested in some of these relationships that emerge over the footage. Footage that really embraced the intimacy of what was going on was what I gravitated towards most. There’s a lot of footage of performances where things are a little bit more hardcore, and I gravitated towards the softness, because I’m trying to invite people in beyond the kink world, beyond the body mod world, right? It’s not that I’m afraid of the more radical, hard stuff, it’s just that I’m trying to create a balance and position this practice as one of embodiment and of consideration and love, and not just aesthetics.

I think that juxtaposition can often be really surprising to outsiders, because it does look so graphic from the outside, but when you get in, it really is about connection.

Totally. And it’s really easy to capitalize off that graphicness, to make it look flashy and hot and whatever. It’s like, yes, I like that, but also there’s this other piece, right?

Right, and this actually goes into my next question: What choices did you make about what to show and what not to show? Or when to show it to avoid sensationalism? There’s a suspension at the end of the film — was placing it at the end a deliberate choice to allow the audience to see it with more context?

Absolutely. I feel like so much context had to be cultivated throughout the course of the film before certain topics would land. Even where we start to unpack cultural appropriation stuff more, that could have come way earlier in the film so an audience I’m aware of the conversation or whatever, right? But I didn’t want to actually bring it in until we had really clear parameters for where and when this was happening before we start to critique it. I think the question of context was really what made the edit so hard — how much information do people need to have to be settled into a certain place before we push them more? 

I knew that I wanted to end with that longer suspension sequence. I knew that from the beginning of the film, and I actually worked backwards. I was like, okay, I want to start with the photographs, I want to end with this suspension sequence. How do we get there using the whole film as a primer? Because during the film, you don’t actually get to fully sit and experience someone’s process, right? So by the time the end of the film comes, that gets to be this pinnacle moment where you get to actually be inside this experience with these people, and you get to even share the same feeling that they’re having. I feel like people get electrified during that scene, you know? That’s the point that energy should come off the screen and be in an audience. And I think that energy can only work that way because they have all this context coming before.

I think so much about narrative structuring. It’s giving people the right tools to experience what’s coming next in the way you want them to, with the information. What sensibility do you want someone to gather from the scene to prepare them for the next scene? And so editing is constantly a process of thinking about how one thing connects to the next, and what you want somebody to take away from something and into the next thing, which is such a fun problem.

Were you ever intimidated by Fakir’s reputation, and the inevitable pressure that comes with portraying him in film?

A little bit, yes, but not as much as I think I could have been. I think part of that is, when I met him, he was already so much softer than he had been in other moments in his life, if that makes sense. I met him when he was already in his late 60s, I met him as an older man, and he had, I think, softened a lot by that point. He was less rigid about some of his ways of thinking, and that translated in our interaction. I think because I met him [when I was] so young, I didn’t have a lot of that star struckness, or I didn’t have a lot of feeling like, ‘oh, this person is a big deal,’ you know? He was just the partner of my partner. And so I think that personal relationship relieves a lot of tension, a lot of pressure, because I didn’t have any fantasies about him. I already shared day-to-day space with him, and play space with him, and sort of knew what he was like. I didn’t bring any fantasies to it, and I didn’t bring any concepts like, ‘oh, this person’s amazing, they changed the world.’ Or, ‘this person is a nightmare, they did all this fucked up shit.’ Just coming from a basic human framework, not elevating him to the status of the god, — I don’t think he would have wanted that anyway, you know? But also not using him as a trash rag to sweep up everybody’s cultural garbage. It’s always easy to point to one person like that’s the problem. Especially thinking about larger problems, like, let’s talk about American imperialism instead of fixating on one person, maybe.

I think I was coming to it from a place of humanity, and not elevation or critique, but also, honestly, just being really interested in, like, a person who’s teaching themselves to develop photographs at 14 in a basement with some chemicals … Photography then was fucking hard, you had to figure out how to use chemical processes to develop shit in the dark and build these machines to do things for you. I feel like I always kind of go back to the inventiveness and the inventor aspect of [Fakir], and those are the things that really compel me. He saw things he wanted to do, and he just figured out how to do them, right? He’s like, ‘Oh, I want to, like, make this thing that squeezes my tits so I can hang from it. I’ll just make it.’ Or, like, ‘I want to figure out how to take these portraits, so I’ll just take these portraits.’ But we today don’t always think about how much work and brainpower and invention and ingenuity it took to actually take a photograph back then, right?

Right, we’re coming from a time where we can just use the phone we’re always carrying.

Exactly. We don’t understand labor in the same way, or craft. There’s craft and there’s labor that’s part of this that I think is easy for us to discount, because we just don’t experience it in the same way.

I wanted to ask more about your decision to include the topic of cultural appropriation, and how you decided when to include it. Obviously it seems important to bring some mention of it, but it’s also a loaded topic.

It does need a little bit of finesse in how it’s handled, because we want to offer a lot of context for how it’s being delivered. But also, it would be pretty thoughtless to not give the wider picture. I mean, I’m not super interested in making commercials for people. I’m not going to make a movie that’s like, ‘this person’s amazing.’ I’m going to make a movie that’s like, ‘this person is complicated, and a lot of things are complicated.’ A lot of the ways we get to our present day positions is through these complicated paths. And I think that it’s actually more meaningful to have that complication beyond the surface. 

I have no interest in, I don’t know what the word would be, but like when you like pink-wash something, like, you take things that are problematic and, just because they’re gay, you make them seem good or whatever. Actually, all of the intricacies and nuances of these decisions we make during our life, and these ideas we have about the world around us are what historically allow us to cultivate other decisions and other ways of moving. If we don’t have a framework for both the benefits and the downsides of cultural movements and cultural frameworks, we don’t have anything. If you don’t know history, how are you supposed to make decisions about moving forward? 

[Placing cultural appropriation in the film] was an interesting editorial choice, because I definitely wanted the people featured in the interviews in the film to stay in — for lack of a better term — Fakir’s circle, people who actually knew him or worked with him, had closeness with him. So I wasn’t about to start branching out to interview indigenous folks — that would also be ethnographic on my part, which is not the way I work. So I really wanted to let the archive do the archive’s work, and the archive did its work. I didn’t have to stretch too hard to be able to bring out that content. I think. 

It’s always a question of how much do you unpack a certain issue, right? I mean, the whole film could have been built around the AIDS crisis. There’s, like, 18 possible films in this one film, and I’m trying to leave space for all of the intersectional components of it to be present, but not to take up so much space as to redirect the film away from relationality, right? The film has to stay with a core in a relational narrative. Part of it is that that’s the stories I gravitate towards, human stories. I don’t make films that are just survey films about topics. I really like films with messy, complicated humans, because human beings are all messy and complicated. There’s just very few of us that get to have our messy complication pronounced so clearly in the public eye.

Definitely. And I think in some ways, the kink and body mod worlds allow for discussions about our messiness, because these are such raw, complicated experiences. I feel like I see more acceptance of the duality of people in these spaces.

I think you’re right, and I think it’s an embodied knowledge. Though it is a talked-about knowledge, I think there’s an embodied understanding that this is tricky, and we’re moving through this trying to figure out what to do, but with the knowledge that everything comes from somewhere — we’re not inventing anything. So, in what ways are we beholden to previous cultures and previous histories of what we’re doing? 

What’s so interesting about Fakir’s appropriation, to me, is that during his lifetime, he wasn’t able to quite wrap his head around it. He thought he was doing these things in reverence. I think so much of the conflict with him is because he really thought that it was important that people knew this stuff came from somewhere, that he wasn’t just making it up, and he wanted people to know that it came from all of these other practices around the world, and it’s been in human culture for millennia, and this is part of humanness, and that the like many other cultures, are actually kind of smarter than we are. Those are things that he wanted people to know, but at the same time, he’s really coming from this, middle-America, post-Depression, post-war, masculinist mentality, even as gender expansion becomes such a huge part of his practice. It’s so interesting to see what his intentions are versus the way they come out. 

When he is around others, you know, he’s a little bit of a chameleon … What’s so interesting about having a figure be in the public eye this way, and then also having a private life, is like, there’s a section in Dances Sacred and Profane where they’re in the desert and they’re site visiting, looking for a place to do the ritual, and and someone has a set of golf clubs in the trunk of their car. The whole set is basically dudes, because it’s film people in the 70s, which is mostly just dudes, like cameras, techie guys. It’s like, all this techie bro stuff. And Fakir pulls up these golf clubs and starts hitting golf balls into the desert. The vibe is just all wrong to me. It lands really poorly. It lands like, ‘Ew, why are all these bros suddenly, like, going into the desert to fucking do a sun dance? I feel gross.’ There’s just all these complications. I have a window into his psychology from watching so much and listening to so much, and the only thing I can think in those moments is that he’s performing maleness to fit in with these other men. He’s performing a certain type of white masculinity, so these guys that are filming with him know that he’s still one of them, even though he’s doing all this freaky shit. And I think that he chameleons to fit in in certain ways a lot of the time. It’s just so interesting and weird. I can relate to it, but also it’s, I don’t know, it’s just fascinating. Like, you’re coming off as a total douche in this clip. And then when I hear you in this other interview, or maybe I hear you speak in private footage, and it’s a really different voice you’re using. I think so much of that imperialism and colonialism that comes through some of his ideas is also wrapped up in him trying to sound legitimate, or him trying to perform legitimacy, right? Like he’s trying to perform ‘I know what I’m doing and this is okay.’ At the same time he’s trying to be woo. I don’t know, it’s a real head fuck.

Definitely, it’s like you said — complex, multifaceted people. I’m curious, what was it like to have spent 20 years knowing Fakir socially, and then transitioning into learning about him in a completely different way through the archive?

I think part of what was interesting about it was hearing the way he talked about things then, the way he talked about things now, and the way that the now was reminiscent of what I knew of him, and the then really wasn’t. He was saying the same things, but the tone was totally different. I think, again, it has to do with this softness of aging, maybe a little bit of the righteousness kind of shaving off the sides. 

I think most people, as they age, become more open and more accepting, and I think that was true for him, too. Some of the things I knew about how difficult he was as a young person — or, not even young, but middle aged person — his collaboration style, his working style. Getting to experience some of the archive did give me a lot of depth into his personality. I was like, ‘Oh, this is the same, except different.’ I think he really dug his heels into his belief systems, and that’s what people who make movements do. I was talking with a friend and I was like, ‘This is why I’m not a very good activist, or I don’t think of myself as a good activist.’ Of course, in day to day life, I know that many things that go on in our reality are not okay — genocide, racism, all the things. At the same time, there’s a way in which, psychologically, abstractly, I always want to be open to the idea that I could be wrong, or my belief systems could be malleable. I want to always be open to the idea that all of my processes and decisions could be not the only way. And I think to be someone who leads a movement, you have to, a little bit, be invested in your way as the right way, right? That’s how you move people. Which sounds fucked up, but I think any movement building is built on a sort of righteousness, a justness of cause, right? And I think the rigidity of Fakir’s personality and his belief system allowed him to do that.

I’m thankful she was okay with including it in the film.

Yeah, she really — in terms of the things I wanted to do with the movie — really just let me go. And I didn’t know she was gonna do that at first. It was a little bit of a slow burn, us figuring out how our collaboration was going to work. But she really did let me do exactly what I wanted to do.

My last question: is there anything you found unexpectedly challenging throughout the process?

I mean, I feel like finding my pace was an interesting challenge, finding the rhythm of the movement, trying to preserve the integrity of the archive, allowing it to play out in certain ways, not chop it up too much. But then, also, I have to craft it for a different time. I don’t think it was an unexpected challenge, but a challenge.

It’s always lovely to see how relationships richen, after you think through things together with someone. You can have all sorts of intimate experiences or play experiences, scene experiences, whatever, but when you start really talking about philosophy with someone, that opens up a whole other way to relate, which I always feel grateful for when I make films that involve a lot of deep conversations with people.