The Victoria showing of a long-running erotic film festival from Seattle has been cancelled after the venue pulled out over licensing problems.
Those who bought about 300 tickets for the festival are expected to receive refunds.
The move comes just weeks after a provincial regulator ordered the festival to pull one of the films this year, citing concerns about content.
Festival organizers said they were notified by the Vic Theatre last week of the cancellation of the May 25 tour date.
Founded in 2005 by Dan Savage, a Seattle-based sex columnist and media personality, HUMP! Film Festival bills itself as the “world’s best amateur porn film festival.”
Guillermo Rossi, industry and events manager at the Vic Theatre, said the festival has been well-received in the past and had even planned on doubling its showings in Victoria this year.
But the Vic Theatre had to cancel the festival screenings and refund venue rental fees to organizers last week, because unlike in past years, this year’s festival was rated by Consumer Protection B.C., and the Vic Theatre doesn’t have the required licences to screen an adult movie, Rossi said.
“It was very sad for us to tell the HUMP! people that this year we cannot do it … it was a surprise for us, too.”
Rossi said the Vic Theatre can typically screen films that have been not been rated by Consumer Protection B.C. because it is a film society — many unrated international films make their Canadian debut in film festivals this way.
Getting an adult-film licence is more expensive and requires extensive paperwork that would not make sense for the theatre, since adult-rated films are not the Vic Theatre’s core business, Rossi said. “It’s just one rental in a year, maybe two — and changing the licence is a whole issue.”
Vic Theatre has booked 80 days of venue rentals so far this year, he said.
More than 50 years ago, the same theatre at 808 Douglas St. — then known as Towne Cinemas — regularly screened adult films, including a series of popular sexploitation films by director Russ Meyer.
HUMP! film festival, which came to Victoria in 2016, was preceded by the 2005 Festival of Forbidden Fruit, an Victoria showcase of erotic independent films, video and performance art that screened at UVic’s Cinecenta, Xchanges, and the Strathcona Hotel.
HUMP! Film Festival executive director Tracey Cotaldo is wondering what changed this year.
On April 11, the festival’s run in Vancouver at the Rio Grande Theatre was put in jeopardy after Consumer Protection B.C. called and told the theatre it could not screen any of the 23 short films in the festival until everything was rated, Cotaldo said.
One of the films, titled The Reward, was ultimately found to be in contravention of B.C.’s motion picture act and had to be cut out on the fly, Cotaldo said.
Cotaldo said the reason given was that sex and bondage were depicted, a decision she called “bizarre” given the subject matter of the festival.
The festival had screened for about 10 years in B.C. without an issue, she said.
It started in 2005 when Savage invited readers of the alt-weekly magazine The Stranger to send in anonymous homemade sex tapes, according to the festival’s website.
After the chosen 16 to 23 films were aired, Savage would dramatically destroy the master tape on stage each year, preventing it from being played again.
The Seattle and Portland-based festival expanded in 2014 and now tours more than 50 cities in Canada and the U.S. An online streaming component was added during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cotaldo said that despite all the changes, “it’s all real people, real couples, real stories.”
This year’s 90-minute lineup includes a range of short films, many involving elements of kink and bondage.
But some of the films focus more on storytelling, poetry and even comedy, she said, adding that not every film includes sexual content.
In a statement, Consumer Protection B.C. spokesperson Tatiana Chabeaux-Smith said the regulator is simply enforcing rules put in place by the B.C. government.
“If a B.C. theatre wants to show adult films, like the HUMP! Festival, there’s a special ‘adult licence’ that allows them to do that,” she said.
Chabeaux-Smith did not provide additional information on why the regulator decided to pull one of the films in this year’s lineup, only citing a section of B.C.’s motion picture act that prohibited the screening of eight categories of sexual or violent acts.
Cotaldo said they substituted the offending film with a blank slide during their three days of showings in Vancouver.
The Reward, the film that was pulled, was performed by two married gay men who signed legal paperwork confirming the acts depicted were consensual, Cotaldo said.
Organizers will be distributing free streaming passes to the full version of the festival to its Vancouver attendees as an apology for the “last-minute snafu,” she said.
The festival has called for ticket holders to complain to Consumer Protection B.C. over what it says is censorship of sexual expression, sex positivity and gender expression.
Cotaldo noted that the festival went off without a hitch when it showed in Montreal last Thursday.
The festival is hoping to return to Vancouver in the fall, but will likely skip Victoria until there is a suitable venue, she said.
