Pornhub Offers to Stream Germany’s Oldenburg Film Festival Amid Coronavirus Shutdown (EXCLUSIVE)
By Matt Donnelly
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Digital juggernaut Pornhub has offered itself as a streaming partner to Germany’s Oldenburg Film Festival, a 26-year-old indie movie event known for edgy programming and quirky celebrity tributes.
The offer, extended by Pornhub vice president Corey Price, comes nearly a week after the festival announced it will forge ahead as planned for a September run. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the festival is aiming for a combination of physical and virtual screenings. The move is yet another recent sign of Pornhub’s seriousness about participating in mainstream cinema.
While the festival has a lower profile than its sisters in Berlin and Munich, it is labelled by some as Germany’s Sundance, and touts an “openness to extremes” on its website. It’s also got history with Pornhub, having premiered an original short from the company called “Her & Him” in 2019, directed by former Disney star Bella Thorne.
“We’d love to elevate the event beyond simply making your content viewable online and take advantage of the digital format to engage with audiences who will be tuning in from around the world. This will offer a much different viewing experience and be more immersive,” Price wrote to the festival. Spokespeople for the Oldenburg Film Festival did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment.
While highly unconventional, Pornhub’s metrics are undeniable. The site logged 115 million visits per day and 39 billion unique searches last year. Price told Variety that the festival has yet to respond to the offer, but thinks “this would further demonstrate our commitment to supporting the arts and entertaining audiences of all kinds.”
The executive underscored Pornhub’s “infrastructure and streaming capabilities in place to do this sort of thing, much like YouTube does, but we are always looking at how we can go further and make things even more interesting.” The company doesn’t find the partnership a stretch as streaming services open in abundance.
“Who knows, maybe in a few years we will be in that discussion or even coming to a theater near you with a film of our own,” Price added.
After the last-minute cancellation of the annual SXSW conference in March, Amazon stepped up and streamed selections from the SXSW film program on its website, in front of the Prime Video paywall. At the end of May, YouTube will present “We Are One: A Global Film Festival,” produced and organized by New York’s Tribeca Enterprises. The streaming event will feature programming from 20 top film festivals including the Cannes Film Festival , Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival , Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Venice Film Festival .
In March, Variety exclusively reported that Pornhub had acquired its first-ever non-erotic film for distribution — the documentary “Shakedown,” a tale of black lesbian strip culture in the early 2000s from director and conceptual artist Leilah Weinraub. The film was hosted on its own unique URL, separate from the billions of hours of adult content uploaded to the main site, and hosted a immersive chat with viewers around the world.
Over the years, Oldenburg has hosted German premieres for films including Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” David Cronenberg’s “Spider,” Luke and Andrew Wilson’s “The Wendell Baker Story” and Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain.”
Tributes and career retrospectives have been mounted, honoring Nicolas Cage, Keith Carradine, Lou Diamond Phillips, Frank Oz and Asia Argento. The 2020 edition is set to run Sept. 16-20.
