Touch Me Not
classified 18 SPlease note: This was screened in Oct 2018
Romanian director Adina Pintilie’s Berlin Golden Bear winner is a bold, quietly provocative drama about one woman struggling with her fear of intimacy, and an unflinching portrait of differently marginalised people (and bodies).
Laura (Laura Benson), an Englishwoman in her early 50s living in an anonymous German city, decides to explore her aversion to physical contact and sex by staging a series of encounters. Among the people sharing stories and acts of intimacy are a male hustler, a trans sex worker and a young man with a severe physical disability; while from behind the camera the figure of the director (Pintilie herself) reflects on the drama, lending the film the confessional intimacy of a therapy session. Touch Me Not explores with intelligence and sensitivity sexuality at its most expansive, diverse views of physical beauty and sensuality, and the ambiguous terrain between fiction and documentary.
Please note: This film contains a sequence of flashing lights which might affect customers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.