中文Ovidie / 2017 / France / 77min / documentary / English / Chinese subtitles / Taiwan premier
In the last six years, humanity has watched the equivalent of 1.2 million years of pornographic videos, and more than one hundred billion pages are visited every year on streaming sites. By themselves, YouPorn and PornHub now account for 2% of Internet bandwidth. Such figures give vertigo on the financial scale of this industry. Yet, porn’s new Internet era has driven down wages, accountability, standards of medical testing and opened up new systems of exploitation. This investigative documentary comes from France’s philosopher of porn, Ovidie, who worked in the porn industry first for 17 years, first as an actress and later as a director. She is the author of a dozen books, including Porno Manifesto (2002). She talks with actresses in the world’s current capital of porn production, Budapest, visits new dormitories for live stream girls, and above all traces the consolidation of the online porn industry to a Canadian company, MindGeek, which Ovidie calls “the Monsanto of porn.” So as much as this is a story a look inside the porn industry, it’s also an investigation to opaque corporate and financial systems of control in an Internet-driven world.