Hot Docs 2008

In Tokyo, filmmaker Hito Steyerl searches for a photo series that she posed for in 1987 as a rope-bondage model. Looking at images of herself shot in the nawa-shibari style, bound and suspended in the air, Steyerl broadens the film's scope beyond Japanese fetishes, beyond her student identity and sexual representation, to more universal metaphors of censorship and pornography. Images of "Spiderman," other Japanese pinups and Guantanamo Bay torture scenes cascade to Depeche Mode and X-Ray Spex beats. Steyerl's sleek and subversive personal story strikingly observes that "there is bondage all over the place."