While all tickets are sold out for the screening, viewing a streaming version of the film is still possible on the Frameline.org site
Exclusive: Clip from Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s ‘Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency’
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from longtime creative and life partners Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, the third film in the pair’s trilogy of queer environmentalist documentaries. Forced to evacuate a fire in the Northern California redwood forest sanctuary where Stephens and Sprinkle live, they channel their energy into their “ecosexual” art, a conceptual activist framework that reframes human relationships to nature to emphasize reciprocity. Playing With Fire premieres at Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ film festival, this Friday.
The film, produced by Keith Wilson (I Didn’t See You There and a three-time collaborator with Stephens and Sprinkle), Oana Tenter, and the directors.
According to the filmmakers, this clip is the scene where “Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle decide to marry fire in an elaborate creative ritual in the Redwood forests of Northern California. Using art and performance to create joy, purify, and deeply investigate fire’s capacity to not only destroy but to regenerate and transform, this queer communal event includes acclaimed artists Guillermo Gómez-Peńa, Balitronica, Guillermo Galindo, Courtney Desiree Morris, Dragonfly, and Madison Young… meanwhile a menagerie of local animals secretly plan to attend.”
Stephens and Sprinkle’s previous co-directed documentaries were Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013) and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure (2017). Sprinkle is well-known for her long career as a groundbreaking feminist post-porn artist, filmmaker, and activist. Their “Ecosex Manifesto” is archived here.