Panel: Reclaiming the Explicit

Panel - 18+ and older.

People think that explicit content is everywhere now, more available and ubiquitous than ever. In reality, it is more restricted. ID checks are expanding across the US and EU, and the tools built to keep minors out are just as likely to lock out the adults who rely on explicit content for sex education, body literacy, and information they can't get anywhere else. Meanwhile, a small number of producers are trying to build mainstream projects in porn, TV, film, and gaming that actually depict sex and intimacy the way most people experience it. This panel asks what gets lost when explicit content is treated as inherently dangerous, and what it would take to recover its educational and cultural value without abandoning the protections that matter.

This panel is for all fans, allies, and stakeholders who want to know how to talk about different types of explicit and erotic content, and who want to fight back against narratives of censorship and control.

With

• Emre Busse - Emre Busse is a Berlin-based researcher and pornographer. His short film The Man Who Perceives All (2024) won Best Short Film at both the 19th Pornfilmfestival Berlin and the 12th Porny Days Film Kunst Festival Zürich. His latest film, Fistule (2026), premiered at the 19th Lust*Streifen Film Festival in Basel, where it won the Best Porn/Intimacy Award, and is now touring festivals and venues worldwide, including Anthology Film Archives in New York. Busse holds a PhD in art history from Freie Universität Berlin, completed with a doctoral fellowship from the Hans Böckler Foundation. His monograph Ethnicity as Desire: Post-Colonial Gay Pornographic Film in Europe was published by De Gruyter in January 2025. His chapter in Tränen aus Stahl: Männlichkeiten zwischen Verletzlichkeit und Gewalt (Tears of Steel: Masculinities between Vulnerability and Violence), edited by Justus Heitzelmann and Xenia Müller (transcript, 2026), examines migration, masculinity, and racialized desire in German gay pornography. He has taught seminars in pornography studies at the University of Bremen and is a member of the DFG-funded Interdisciplinary Pornography Research Network.
   
• Francesca M. Bourgade - Francesca Maria Bourgade Trapani is a certified sexologist, sex educator, Somatica®-trained Somatic Coach, and founder of Cosmo Intimacy. Her work explores desire, pleasure, relationships, and embodied connection through sexological education and somatic approaches to intimacy. At the intersection of sexuality, culture, and therapeutic practice, she is particularly interested in the potential of erotic media to support sexual self-exploration, deepen self-understanding, and enrich contemporary sex therapy. She advocates for nuanced, sex-positive conversations about pornography, consent, and sexual wellbeing.
   
• Ambrita Sunshine (IG:@ambritasunshine) is a performer of Ivorian and Italian heritage. For over twenty years, she has been active in the world of live stage performance, with a path that intertwines sexuality and pornography in multiple forms, from live performance to fetish and BDSM film, alongside a longstanding practice as a dominatrix. She has participated in several editions of the Berlin Porn Film Festival, one of the field's leading international showcases. She is also a certified energetic healer, specializing in extreme work on demonology. Her work merges with dance and a spiritual, energetic practice that takes her to live and travel between West Africa, Europe, and Asia, particularly Japan.
   
• Paulita Pappel - Filmmaker; Cofounder, Lustery.com and HardWerk; Curator, Porn Film Festival Berlin; Intimacy Coordinator.

Moderated by

Lina Bembe (Instagram: @linabembe) - is an award winning porn performer, filmmaker, educator, and curator with 10+ years experience in the adult film industry. Throughout her career, she has appeared in a diverse range of projects, from mainstream porn to feminist-driven works, DIY queer post-porn, and explicit sex education. Her activism spans writing, public speaking, and curation, with an emphasis on topics such as sex education, feminism, intimacy coordination, the ethical representation of BIPOC bodies in porn, and the politics of explicit sexuality.