The director of the Sydney Underground Film Festival has come out in support of controversial flicks Porn Masala and Donkey Love after they've been banned in countries around the world after screening at the Sydney festival this year.
The Ken Kwek-directed Sex.Violence.FamilyValues, which is made up of three short films, one of them being Porn Masala, was refused a rating in Singapore this week, while Canadian filmmaker Daryl Soneage's Donkey Love, a documentary about a donkey-fancying Columbians, has forced the cancellation an entire film festival (the Okanagan Film Festival) in Canada after the theatre reacted poorly to the film.
The Sydney Underground Film Festival's director Stefan Popescu described the move by the Singaporean government to ban Kwek's film as a “cultural tragedy”.
He said the festival “fully supports the film whole heartedly and feels it's a witty and satirical commentary on both sexual and racial stereotypes in contemporary society. To ban such a work on the basis of it being racially 'demeaning and offensive', not only ignores the evident elements of satire and parody, reducing the film to something it is not, but also restricts an artist's inherent right to freedom of speech.”
A press release from the Sydney event said of Donkey Love that, “The film documents something very real going on in remote parts of Columbia, which is at times even celebrated and taught in local schools. We sincerely hope the Okangan Film Festival will be postponed rather than cancelled altogether.”
Watch the trailers for both below:
