Erika Lust
Website
Erika Lust is an indie erotic filmmaker based in Barcelona. She's the owner and co-founder of Erika Lust Films, where she offers an alternative to the mainstream porn industry. She is also the creator of groundbreaking audiovisual project XConfessions.com, the first crowdsourced series that brought adult film to cinema screens. Every month Erika Lust picks two of her followers’ fantasies and turns them into cinematic explicit short films.
Born in 1977 in Sweden, she studied political sciences, feminism and sexuality at the University of Lund. Tired of chauvinistic and tacky mainstream porn, she moved to Barcelona in 2000 where she took classes in film directing before bursting into the adult industry in 2004, with the indie short film The Good Girl - a humorous statement of principles using the “pizza delivery boy” trope. The immediate success of this first attempt encouraged her to pursue a career in adult cinema.
In 2015, she gave her “It’s Time for Porn to Change” talk at TEDxVienna which gained her notoriety for her campaign to change porn. In 2016 she launched her Open Call for Guest Directors for XConfessions, encouraging female filmmakers from all around the world to join her in the new golden age of female-led erotica.
Erika’s philosophy for a new adult cinema is based on 4 main ideas: women’s pleasure matters, adult cinema can have cinematic values, we need more body types, different ages and diverse races and the production process has to be ethical. She defends the importance of the female gaze and the need of having women behind the camera in all key positions. Erika lives in Barcelona with her partner and husband Pablo and their two daughters.