Fucking Conflicts started their journey in 2020. A spontaneous film shooting initiated a solid collaboration between Officer Flower and Iris Glitzer (pronouns of both: they/them), resulting in the production of further juicy films, with a soft spot for storytelling, a DIY approach and a cinephile toolset. Fucking Conflicts’ work has been presented at porn film festivals around the globe as well as in broader themed festivals, being multiply nominated and winning the International Short Factual Film Award at the Athens PFF 2023 (for “Stalking Athens”) as well as the Best Ass-a-liciousness Award at the PFF Vienna 2024 (for “June in Warsaw”) and the Outstanding Artistic Contribution Award at the Hacker PFF Rome 2024 (for “Input Error II”). Fucking Conflicts wish to further explore landscapes of lust, representing and staging sexualities through a queer feminist lens.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fuckingconflicts/
Pink Label: https://pinklabel.tv/on-demand/studio/fucking-conflicts/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/fuckingconflictsTelegram Channel: https://t.me/+VRZlPI_AunlmNDIy
When did you start working with pornographic, explicit material?
Officer Flower: Somewhere between 5 or 6 years ago.
Iris Glitzer: Basically, I started doing porn when we first collaborated with each other. So it was December 2020. I know that for sure.
What motivates you to work with explicit pornographic material?
Iris Glitzer: Well, first of all, it’s fun. So when something is fun, you want more of it. But I think what actually speaks to me so much about this kind of work is that I feel that I can express myself more freely through it. Because there is something super powerful about nakedness and the vulnerability of sex. So I find this very interesting.
Officer Flower: That’s a beautiful answer. Definitely also fun. I think for me, doing porn also helps me a lot to go through stuff in my life, and it just makes me happy. I can’t really think about why not to work with explicit and pornographic material.
What is the difference between mainstream pornography and post porn?
Officer Flower: This is not very easy to answer, but I will make it very quick: For me, post-porn and mainstream, if you want to put it on it on a scale, are very far away from each other. Even, whatever we’re talking about, isn’t it always a scale but more like a matrix. Post porn is political, but also has a lot of things that can be overlapping with art. It can do more than anything else can do because it can just define itself and say, oh, this is porn through a political reason it can make everything porn. Mainstream wants to sell something, so there’s always this idea of appealing to mainstream tastes. And post porn doesn’t need to do this. And in between that, there are thousand different possibilities to find your way to maybe appeal that a bit there, maybe make a little bit of money from this, or maybe do something completely political that no one wants to see. Very opposite, things on a scale, but find your way to do whatever you like in the middle of whatever you want.
Iris Glitzer: If you try to make a rough cut out of it, you would make the parallel of mainstream being the “sell the product”-part that has to do with representations of sexual and explicit acts and post porn starts with nakedness and explicitness as a starting point, but is always able to redefine itself new and just uses it as a tool, but can freely talk about anything it wants.
What are the topics or stories you want to tell?
Iris Glitzer: Oh, so, so, so many. Where do I start? Well, I’m a queer person. Officer Flower is a queer person. We are two queer people. So, representation, identity, and sexuality play a big role in our work as Fucking Conflicts. I’m very interested in the intersections of gender identity and other very politically loaded topics. That’s crucial when it comes to sex and porn, and I’m also very interested in finding ways to create a narrative that might start in the future. Maybe you have a cyberpunk story and it starts talking about sex robots. But, although it seems very far away from our reality, it actually addresses topics that have to do with the lives of people right here, right now. So I like looking in the future and looking in the past and trying to connect it with my now-experiences. And it also always feels very personal. So the topics that are very dear to me and keep me up at night, you will find in our films.
What are your ethical standards in your films?
Iris Glitzer: One thing that I find very important is: I don’t like objectifying bodies, any kind of bodies, not just more marginalized bodies. I just don’t like objectifying people. Except, of course, it’s part of a game of a scene, that people consented to. One other thing that I don’t like doing is glorifying violence or toxic behaviors. So this doesn’t mean that you will not see them in our films. We’re not trying to just be kind and light and giggly. You will definitely find some hardcore scenes that might also trigger some people. But at least we’re trying to be conscious of the topics we show and carefully frame them so where they have a reason why they exist. It’s a difficult question. But, let’s wrap it up the following way: What I really care for is to be respectful of the time and of the background of the audience. So we will try normally our best to not trigger bad stuff. And we will try to have some smoothing elements. So that people might come across difficult topics but maybe in the end they feel more empowered and thrilled than traumatized for life. I hope so.
What are your ethical standards in your production or on set?
Officer Flower: We always try our best that everybody is happy. That can’t happen all the time because we are a small production. We don’t have any money that we really can spend. We try our best, but the most important thing for the start, because we talked about money, is I personally like to pay everybody on set the same amount of money. That means everyone gets not very much but the same amount of money for each day they work on set. And we try our best that everybody is aware that they discuss about the scene before, that they find consent what they want to do and that they don’t talk the last day before the shoot about what they want to do and then find out they don’t want to do it at all. This doesn’t always work out, but it’s something we want to establish.
Iris Glitzer: So it basically has to do with a lot of preparation, because in our experience, we found out that the more you prepare in advance and the more you talk with the people, not just with performers, but the whole cast and crew, the more you’re going to be on the same page of the same book and on the same sentence. Communication is key.
How do you finance and fund your projects?
Officer Flower: At the moment, we finance our projects through our main jobs, the jobs that we are doing that are not connected to porn.
Iris Glitzer: Our civilian jobs.
Officer Flower: And in the future, we try to change this. Somehow finding finances outside of those day jobs we do. But it’s not very easy because we are doing what we want to do. We are not trying to do mainstream. Not that mainstream is bad. It’s just we don’t do it right now. And so, as we already talked about, mainstream makes the money and we not. But we try.
Iris Glitzer: Yep. That’s life.
How do you collaborate / network with other filmmakers or performers?
Iris Glitzer: Well, we have collaborated with many different people for many different roles in productions. Starting from collaborations already in the pre-production and finding the people who will inspire each other and gather our whole cast and crew and work with the cast, the script and make changes that are needed. And also working at the scenery, the set design of bigger productions. We’re also having the set designer included from the very beginning of the pre-production. Of course, everything you might need on the day of the shooting but also to the post-production, where we have frequently needed help, be it’s assistance in the editing process to color grading to music, which is damn important and so beautiful when it’s done properly and with heart. So the way we collaborate: we have often collaborated in a base was that nobody had money and we knew it, and this was okay. It was more like “I help you, you help me, and we see where it goes”. But as we processed we realized that it was really important to us that we were able to pay our cast and crew, as we mentioned before. So this is where we are now. So it’s not anymore the situation where I will perform for somebody else’s production and then they will perform in ours, but it’s more like we have our productions, so we pay the people that we need for the work that they can provide to us.
What role do (post-)porn film festivals play in your work?
Officer Flower: (Porn-) film festivals are important for our networking. We find not only our audience there but also people who want to work with us. Showing our films give us the opportunity that people say ‘oh, yeah, I like this and I want to work with you’. And maybe then something comes together, but also it’s our community. We love to go there, it’s also important that we see our friends and chosen friends and family.
Iris Glitzer: Like this person who is going to receive this video, for example. It really feels like family and friends.
Officer Flower: I can add: We’re doing films for festivals. Also a reason why we don’t receive money through this. We try to keep our films in an ‘unskippable’ way. They shouldn’t be boring. If they are boring, then we are sorry, but we try our best to that they are short edited, so that you want to see every single part of it. And this is definitely because we want to see them on screen and we don’t want to bore the audience to a level where they need to leave the cinema. Festivals are important for us.
How does the internet affect your work?
Iris Glitzer: Mostly in a positive way. If you come to think about all the collected knowledge that we have access to. Just to name a simple, easy example: whenever I am trying to do the ending or opening titles and I’m looking for ideas and I feel helpless how to navigate my way in After Effects or another program. I will definitely start looking for YouTube videos. Or when we are editing and we are having trouble with color grading – that’s a very typical one. Or with sound or with whatever you can imagine. Internet helps actually a lot when it comes to technical questions. Like how to approach this scene? And what kind of a camera would you use? Should it be a camera movement, should it be like this, like that, the other way? So you get a lot of technical information that are important and a lot of inspiration, of course. Because we love watching films and most of the films, we watched them from home and we stream them from internet. So there we gather all the inspiration that we are then able to use in our own productions.
Do you share your works on platforms like OnlyFans, Fansly or Pink-Label, Arthouse, or even Pornhub?
Officer Flower: Yes, we share our films on pink label.
How do you work with social media?
Iris Glitzer: Terribly, awfuly, it sucks, seriously.
Officer Flower: There’s no way to describe it otherwise. Social media is a hassle, that you just don’t want to do. There’s a lot of stuff that is fun and exciting and filming is fun. Doing porn in front of the camera and behind it, and even post-production is fun, though it’s stressful. Social media is just: You need to do it so that people see you. But it also seems like you never know when it just comes from behind and stabs you. “This rule, and this rule would be okay.” – “No not today. Today we just turn your channel off forever.” We are on Instagram, but we don’t know for how long. I don’t know, maybe we should also be on other medias, but this is so much work.
In the time you work in this field, what have been the biggest changes?
Iris Glitzer: When I started, I actually started just out of curiosity, without any expectations, without having a clear idea why I’m so damn interested in doing porn. And the more I do it, the more I love it, and the more I really care about it. And the more I realize all the different ways why it feels so important for me and so heavily political. And to the extent that it feels part of who I am, part of my identity and it’s something to fight for. What has changed is that I became way more aware about it, about my very personal role in our productions, in our collaborations with other people and the dynamics that gets established. Between directors and other performers for example. And about how porn is positioned in the broader world of sex work and what it means, society wise.
It has actually changed so much my relationship to porn that I get so excited that, in September, we are going to be mentoring other people to produce their own porn. And I’m very, very happy and excited for that. I’m looking forward to.
Officer Flower: For me everything I did artistically was always like I wanted to do something big and society changing. And I think that it’s a way of approaching a change. I still try to do something that is maybe big, but I’m maybe not as fixated on doing something extremely society changing. There’s no pressure behind it now, because I want to do things for fun. I want to do stuff because I like it. Also the reason why we don’t get money. This was a long realization. And so right now I just want to do it and before it was more like I wanted to be the best in the world and now I just want to do it. Just because it’s fun. And also I want to connect through porn with other people and we are connecting somehow by teaching in the future to others what we learned in our process.
Iris Glitzer: And all the mistakes that we did, so that maybe other people don’t have to do the same. They can do their own.
How open do you communicate with your friends and family about your work?
Officer Flower: Family wise I sadly don’t communicate enough although I think that my family is very open. Friends, well, they all know, there is no way they can’t know. Because if I can’t talk about porn I’m already bored.
Iris Glitzer: Same here. From my family I do have three people that know about it. Three people whom I know I can trust with this information because we understand each other. But my parents definitely don’t belong to this three people. I have already had some coming out to them, I don’t know if they are ready for more and I don’t know where to start. So I just leave the topic for the time being. But friends, I mean, obviously we choose our friends. So if I am not able to talk with my friends, to my friends about my porn work then I would be very concerned about the base of that friendship. But except for that it’s also not like I feel comfortable talking about my porn work in my civilian work. Again, it’s like family. Only very few people know about it. And for the rest: I don’t want to put on their plate more than they can chew. And I also want to protect also this part of my civilian life, to be able to keep on having that work so that I can do my porn.