Our friend the alternative gay movie director Noel Alejandro is proud to announce the release of his first drama-psychological erotic film, “C all Me a Ghost”. We have the trailer for you. Starring Valentín and Pierre. Filmed and edited in Brussels (2017). The full movie will be available on www.noelalejandro.com on Friday 17th February! Read below: A conversation about sex, sadness and pornography by Noel Alejandro. Still photos by FilipVanz.
In Alejandro’s protagonist’s life, something seems to be permanently out of place. He is intelligent, attractive and talented – however this supposedly good life seems to lose relevance as he falls into commanding sadness. He resists to leave his house and starts to feel desolation taking over when, at the apex of a major crisis, he is visited by a supernatural presence.
Feeling strangely attracted to it and with nothing to lose, he welcomes the ghost, maybe hoping to sense contact with someone else. Will this strange presence become a safe harbour for him to reassert control?
The ghost is surprisingly graceful: is there a place for desire in sadness? Could pleasure become a weapon in fighting deep solitude? Part of the director’s effort in pushing the boundaries of the adult film industry, Call Me a Ghost is a moving portrayal of human melancholy, and a daring exploration of the roles of sex, pleasure and intimacy in the life of a man whose hope is falling short.
Call Me a Ghost . 18 min, 2017, EN. Directed by Noel Alejandro. Starring Valentín and Pierre. Will be available on www.noelalejandro.com on Friday 17th February. Read our interview with Noel HERE
A conversation about sex, sadness and pornography
by Noel Alejandro
Call Me a Ghost was made to tell us that sometimes feeling blue is fine – even in the porn world
Somewhere in the city someone wakes up with the chest as heavy as a sad white whale. His room is orbiting a thousand leagues from Earth, his eyelids weigh a thousand tears. From everything he owns, nothing is in place. He is sad. And that’s alright.
Sadness wasn’t my first emotion choice when writing Call Me a Ghost. The original inspiration was about doing a good explicit film about the supernatural, something with ghosts and a good dose of mystery. But the more I thought about the plot, and the more I explored the details, the more I saw this sad atmosphere surrounding my character. At first I thought it was presumptuous (or even just wrong) and started to hysterically shake my hand over my character’s head trying to dissipate the dark clouds. But they just wouldn’t go away. And then I understood.
My character is sad because I am sad. Because we’re all feeling a bit lonely and insecure (it’s alright ma, I’m only bleeding). It’s not that his life is pointless and everything sucks, it doesn’t have to be so desperate. It’s just that sometimes life can be hard, and we strive to push through and keep moving and cling to what we can in order to get up. In my character’s life, the climbing hook happened to be a ghost. A ghost! Like Casper, but for gay adults.
You see, connecting with a ghost is a lot easier as, unlike humans, ghosts don’t wear armours. Their soul is right there, asking to be touched. They’re not hidden inside themselves (or their houses, their job titles, their favorite songs at the nightclub). In a very delicate dialogue in the film, the ghost patiently explains that he doesn’t need a job, or money, or acceptance – so he doesn’t have to feel bad about any of that. Human life asks a lot. Human life offers a lot of gears for us to dig holes inside ourselves.
Life is tragedy. Speaking of it openly isn’t just a way of breaking with the illusory rules that oblige us to be happy and forget all that’s bad, but it is also a liberation from the laziness of not dealing with it. To talk about depressive feelings in an erotic film is an attempt to stop trying to eliminate sadness from our lives. Experimenting sad emotions, talking about them, or portraying them are a part of our constant struggle to overcome it – even in this happens in an adult explicit film.
A fuck with sweat and tears
Often, when trying to give adult films a more serious approach, directors tend to take negative paths. Feelings like sadness or depression are constantly linked to heavy conflicts like drugs, crime or social rejection. Even the most sex positive porn directors have a position of “sex has to be happy by all means”. I believe merging blue feelings and sex can be extraordinarily liberating, just as much as it is liberating in our most human, individual level.
Call Me a Ghost is a short film about sex in a dramatic and introspective context, a vindication of feelings in the peculiarity of the pornographic genre. It is a personal bet, trying to converge both things. It is also the result of a personal year of adaptation in a new city, Brussels, where feelings of loneliness and sadness are quite frequent.
