An epic experimental film, PINOCHET PORN embodies -- though a dizzying array of stories and narrative methods -- the multifaceted work of artist Ellen Cantor. Using her 2004 series of 82 drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional "script," Cantor worked on PINOCHET PORN, her most ambitious project, for the last five years of her life. The feature-length, episodic narrative, about the intertwined lives of five children and their maturation into adulthood, would be completed posthumously by her close collaborators -- including her cast and crew -- according to her directives. Using Super-8mm film, archival video footage, and digital animated drawings, PINOCHET PORN takes the form of a soap opera, at once tragic and comic, and marked by a subversive sexuality. Its story weaves between personal, political, and historical circumstances, obliquely revolving around the political discord in Chile during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The film is also a document of an extended moment in New York and London avant-garde art and culture, featuring a range of artists, curators, writers, filmmakers, fixtures of the underground, musicians, and their children.
