Erika Lust

Erika Lust is a Swedish erotic film director, screenwriter and producer. Alongside others such as Petra Joy and Anna Span, Lust has been instrumental in promoting the aims of the feminist pornography movement. She has written several books. She lives and works in Barcelona.
Her film Cabaret Desire won her the Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year in 2012. It also won the Cinekink Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature. The first two compilations of her XConfessions series have won her the Feminist Porn Awards for Hottest Straight Vignette in 2014 and 2015 respectively. In 2015, A theatrical cut of XConfessions was screened at Chicago International Film Festival and at Raindance Film Festival in London. Following that, in 2016, Lust held two sold out screenings of the XConfessions Theatrical Cut at Babylon in Berlin in February and won Best Narrative Short at the Cinekink Awards for short film An Appointment with My Master.

Lust was born Erika Hallqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1977. She harboured a passion for film and theatre.

She went to Lund University, where she studied Political Sciences. While there, she came across Linda Williams' 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", which later came to strongly influence her filmmaking. She also cites Jean Jacques Annaud's The Lover as a source of inspiration. She graduated with a BA in 1999, with a specialization in human rights and feminism. She moved to Barcelona in 2000, where she worked in production houses and took night courses in filmmaking.

Lust shot her first film, the explicit short The Good Girl, in 2004. It was released for free on the internet and downloaded over 2 million times in the first month. The film was shown at the Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival the next year and won her a Ninfa Award.

In 2005, after this initial success, she founded her video production company Lust Films. The company has produced erotic short films and compilations steadily from then on. Five Hot Stories For Her, an anthology of five vignettes including The Good Girl, won several international awards in 2007. Since then she has been a regular on the adult cinema festival circuit.

Erika Lust's films are characterized by carefully cast actors and high standards of production in adult film. Erika Lust believes explicit film can be an educational tool besides being pleasurable and can help us better understand our sexuality, to live more freely and naturally. She hopes to influence viewers' conceptions of gender roles in sexuality. She considers pornography to be the "most important discourse on gender and sexuality".

In 2010, Lust opened an online erotic cinema called Lust Cinema, exhibiting her own films and those of other authors of the new wave of explicit films.

Erika Lust started the first crowdsourced project in the history of adult cinema in 2013, calling it XConfessions. It has become her main source of work in recent years.

She runs an online store offering her books and films, as well as sex toys and other erotic wares. Her company Lust Productions now has 12 employees. She also maintains a blog. She has written several books on eroticism and sexuality. Her book Good Porn was published in 2009 by Seal Press.

In December 2014, Erika Lust hosted a TED-talk at TEDxVienna. In the talk, entitled "It's Time For Porn To Change", Lust urges people to question the modern state of porn, its messages and role as a sexual educator. The TED-talk launched the start of her campaign #changeporn, an online campaign intended to challenge and change the porn norm. The talk has been watched over 400,000 times on YouTube.

Lust is currently producing short adult films based on crowd-sourced stories. Viewers can leave anonymous confessions on the project's website. Each month, Lust handpicks two stories and turn them into cinematic short films. She has already published five volumes of XConfessions shorts. XConfessions has been presented at the Berlin Porn Festival 2014. In 2015, a theatrical cut of XConfessions was screened along with a talk by Lust at the Raindance Film Festival in London and at the Chicago International Film Festival. In 2016 Lust held two sold out screenings of the XConfessions Theatrical Cut at Babylon in Berlin in February and won Best Narrative Short at the Cinekink Awards New York for BDSM short film An Appointment with My Master.

Feature films

• 2008: Barcelona Sex Project
• 2010: Life Love Lust
• 2011: Cabaret Desire

Compilations of Shorts

• 2007: Five Hot Stories For Her incl. Something about Nadia
• 2013: XConfessions vol. 1
• 2014: XConfessions vol. 2 incl. The Art of Spanking
• 2014: XConfessions vol. 3
• 2015: XConfessions vol. 4
• 2015: XConfessions vol. 5
• 2016: XConfessions vol. 6

Short films

• 2004: The Good Girl
• 2009: Handcuffs
• 2010: Love Me Like You Hate Me (made with Venus O'Hara)
• 2011: Room 33 (sequel to Handcuffs)

• 2009: X: a Woman's Guide to Good Porn
• 2010: Erotic Bible to Europe
• 2010: Love Me Like You Hate Me with Venus O'Hara
• 2011: Shooting Sex: How to Make an Outstanding Sex Movie with Your Partner (ebook also available in polish)
• 2011: Six Female Voices with Antia Pagant
• 2013: La Canción de Nora (Nora's Song)
• 2013: Let's Make a Porno

• "Jak nakręcić porno. Praktyczny poradnik filmowania seksu". Kinky Winky. Retrieved 12 January 2016.