Coming to VOD tomorrow, Friday, September 12: DICK: THE DOCUMENTARY
Brian Fender’s exploration of men’s relationships to their penises debuted at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last year. IndiePix now releases the doc on VOD, with a DVD release planned for next year.
Placing an ad on Craigslist back in 2008, Fender solicited the participation of anonymous male subjects willing to expose their bodies for his camera. Using a simple, utilitarian camera set-up, framing the men from the neck down, the director appears as an offscreen interlocutor, posing a range of questions to engage them on the topic of their dicks and how they relate to them. Representing a cross-section of ages, races, sizes, and sexualities, the men take the opportunity afforded by anonymity and curiosity to open up about self-perception, early sexual experiences, and traumas, from sexual abuse to small penis jokes to prostate cancer. Despite clocking in at barely over 45 minutes, the project feels a bit overlong – even if the men are engaging, some anecdotes are excessive, and the basic set-up wears thin after awhile. That said, while there have been other documentaries that have explored the topic, this is still generally unexplored terrain, at least in comparison to media and writing that features women considering their own bodies, so Fender’s film is a welcome attempt to focus on an unnecessarily taboo topic.
what (not) to doc 