BDSM

Yesterday, Beatrice Behn showed me that The Artist & The Pervert has its own Wikipedia entry.

Seven years after Beatrice and I made this film, it continues to circulate — screened, cited, discussed. It’s been referenced in academic research on race and BDSM, used in university seminars, and cited alongside work by Jeremy O. Harris in scholarly discourse. This felt like an appropriate moment to pause and reflect on what this project was, what it demanded of us, and what it left behind.

How We Almost Didn’t Make This Film

In 2016, Beatrice saw a New York Times article about composer Georg Friedrich Haas and kink educator Mollena Williams-Haas — their relationship, their artistic practices, their master/slave BDSM contract. They messaged me:

“WE SHOULD MAKE A FILM ABOUT THIS.”

Neither of us had directed a feature-length film or documentary before. I came from advertising — an art director who’d won awards at Cannes. Beatrice was a film critic and editor-in-chief of Germany’s biggest arthouse film portal. We’d made a few experimental short films. That was it.

We messaged Georg on Fetlife (a social network for the BDSM community), figuring they probably wouldn’t get many messages on that platform. They replied immediately. Two weeks later, we started filming.

With a flip camera.

No crew. No lighting equipment. No sound person. Just the two of us, a camera that cost less than €500, and spontaneity. We followed them for a year — New York, Vienna, Hamburg, Schwetzingen, San Francisco, the lonely mountains of Austria. We learned as we went.
The film is 100% independent. Zero budget. Zero funding. We crowdfunded the final post-production — sound mixing and creating DCPs for festival screenings. That was it.

When we began, we didn’t know it was impossible to make a film like this. And it was precisely this not-knowing — paired with a kind of obsessive focus — that made it possible at all.

What we had instead of resources was proximity, trust, and a shared willingness to stay with discomfort.

A Few Learnings From That Time

Certain principles became structural to the process of making the film:

Consent is not a one-time agreement.
Consent had to be revisited before every shoot, every scene. We learned to articulate it verbally, to pause when something shifted, to ask whether a moment felt revealing or extractive, necessary or merely spectacular. We constantly questioned our decisions—what to film, how to frame it, whether we were witnessing or exploiting.

Ethics are inseparable from form.
Every aesthetic decision was also an ethical one. Making a film about BDSM—a practice built on explicit consent—meant our filmmaking process had to embody those same principles. Asking someone to be vulnerable on camera while hiding behind the abstraction of “artistic vision” was never an option. Responsibility could not be outsourced to style.

Representation is never neutral — especially where race is involved.
We were two white German filmmakers making a film about a Black woman in a master/slave dynamic with a white Austrian man with a Nazi background in his family. We continuously questioned how images would circulate once detached from context: who would read them, through which lenses, and with which projections. How do we honor Mollena’s agency while acknowledging the optics? There was no final answer—only ongoing negotiation.

In our Seventh Row interview, Beatrice said:

“We didn’t want to make another freak show film where you can look at them but they can’t look back at you.”

That’s why Mollena breaks the fourth wall in the opening—she stares directly at the camera, at the audience. You’re not just observing her; she’s observing you.

Making a Film on a Zero Budget.

Sometimes, technical limitations force better creative decisions.

We couldn’t afford a large crew, so we were just two people. That meant Georg and Mollena weren’t surrounded by strangers. Intimacy was possible.

We couldn’t afford fancy lighting, so we shot with available light. That meant the film looks like their actual lives, not a stylized version.

We couldn’t afford extensive travel, so we planned carefully. That meant every shoot was intentional.

The flip camera was small and unintimidating. When Georg and Mollena had intimate conversations in their bedroom, they could almost forget we were there. A full cinema crew with lighting rigs and boom mics? That would have changed everything.

The film’s intimacy is inseparable from how we made it.

Would the image quality be “better” with proper equipment? Sure. But would it be more honest? I don’t think so.

The Film’s Unexpected Academic Journey

What we didn’t anticipate was how the film would find its own life beyond festival circuits.

The documentary has been cited in scholarly research across multiple disciplines:

Christa Brüstle, Professor of Musicology and Gender Studies at Kunstuniversität Graz, analyzed the film as part of her research on gender and composition, examining Haas’s connection between his sadism and creativity.

Avgi Saketopoulou used the documentary as an example illustrating how “traumatophilia offers those with trauma a vital and often pleasurable life that goes beyond the prospects of ‘trauma culture’ in which victimhood is the focus.”

And perhaps most significantly: In 2020, Ariane Cruz — author of The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (NYU Press) — cited our documentary as one of three works marking “a juncture in the academic study of race and BDSM.”

The other works she cited were Kinky (dir. Jean Claude La Marre, 2018), Jeremy O. Harris’s Black Exhibition (2019), and Slave Play (written by Harris, directed by Robert O’Hara).

When we were filming in 2016, we never imagined scholars would be citing us in this company. The work we made and published had its own life. It was impossible to predict or control how the audience would perceive it, which conversations it would enter, and which meanings it would accumulate beyond our intentions.

“So, When’s Your Next Film?”

After the world premiere, at every festival, journalists kept asking us: “What’s your next film, now that you have started a filmmaking career?”

Having been relieved of actually having managed to finish this film, we found that question both irritating and frustrating. Who defines what a “career” is? Why does following one documentary with another documentary make more sense than any other path?

Beatrice continued to work in film criticism and editing. I was still working as an art director.

What was more important to us than filmmaking itself: the questions the film had asked.

How can personal experiences being shared honestly with the world change how people think about their lives? How do we create spaces where people can explore power, vulnerability, and intimacy outside conventional scripts? How do we build communities that prioritize consent as an ongoing conversation?

Those aren’t just questions for documentaries. They’re questions for how we live.

The Real Sequel: Karada House

The logical next step, as it turned out, wasn’t another film.

It was co-founding Karada House in Berlin — a queer community space dedicated to Japanese-inspired rope bondage, embodied kink practices, research about sexuality, and the kind of ongoing negotiation and curiosity that the film explored.

In the same way the film held space for complexity around BDSM, consent, and representation, Karada House tries to hold space for people exploring their bodies, their boundaries, and their desires. Kink, politics, and self-discovery are interrogated in the same spirit that the film embodied.

We don’t have the answers. We create the container for people to figure things out for themselves. We prioritize consent as an ongoing conversation. We center queer and trans bodies. We make space for people who don’t fit conventional narratives.
That’s the sequel to The Artist & The Pervert. Not another documentary. A lived practice.

Seven Years Later: What Continues

The film still screens occasionally at film and music festivals — sometimes in anthologies about Georg’s work. It’s available on VOD platforms. It gets cited in academic papers and on Wikipedia.

But the real continuation isn’t the film’s afterlife. It’s the questions it opened up, still being explored — in scholarship, in conversations, in spaces like Karada House, in my own evolving practice.

Currently, I work more with performance, rope art, and photography than filmmaking. But the core remains consistent:

• Bodies as sites where identity, memory, vulnerability, and resistance are enacted
• Creative collaborations as a partnership
• Listening to people instead of assuming
• Creating conditions where unpredictable outcomes can emerge
• Trust and consent as foundational, not optional

And It’s Done! (Or Not Really)

The film ends with Mollena’s last words: “And it’s done!” But it doesn’t conclude. Georg and Mollena’s relationship continues. The questions continue. The conversation continues.

That’s intentional. We didn’t want to wrap things up neatly. Life isn’t neat. Love isn’t neat. Power dynamics aren’t neat.

The film is a year in their lives. A snapshot. A document of a moment in time.

Looking back now, it feels clear that The Artist & The Pervert was less a finished statement than a threshold. Its real continuation unfolded elsewhere: in institutions, in intimate conversations, in subsequent projects shaped by the questions it forced us to confront.

Seven years later, that moment is still reverberating. In academic papers. In Karada House workshops. In my rope practice. In conversations between people trying to figure out how to live ethically, vulnerably, outside convention.

That’s more than we ever hoped for when Beatrice and I started filming.

Maybe that’s the real filmmaker’s career focus: what stories can I tell, and how does it relate to people? Not “what’s the next film?”

The space we created for those questions simply changed form.