Todo a la vez (la mirada de Paco y Manolo)

This is a documentary about Paco and Manalo, a gay married couple in Barcelona, who are both photographers, often of naked men. They are best known for their work for Kink magazine. They talk about their life and philosophy. We get to see collages of their work, some of their photo shoots, their work in editing and printing. We also get expositions from some of their models, which could be shortened.

The material is interesting, especially to those who may be interested in photography or male nudes, but at over 100 minutes, it eventually felt too long. I was happy to see this film as a digital screening at the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ film festival, where I could stop and rewind, so that I could read the subtitles and watch the photo shoot separately, but that made the film even longer. Also, I didn't need the postscript about covid confinement.

This is not a feature film, but a documentary, it's about this elderly gay couple Paco and Manolo, who for almost 20 years now are the editors of an erotic magazine called "Kink", with pictures of naked men, for which they both do all the photography themselves. We see the couple telling all about this work and their approach, and we also witness a number of their shooting-sessions with naked men.

Although Paco and Manolo seem like sympathetic men, it got a bit on my nerves how they kept on chattering, rather self-indulgently, about their professionalism and sincerity, and that their magazine is absolutely not porn and doesn't belong in a sex-shop, but in mainstream bookstores. To me the way they work, with simple looking camera's and without any reflecting screens etcetera, looks rather amateurish, as do the settings (mostly an old sofa or the balcony in their own apartment, or somewhere out in the bushes). And the way the two of them endlessly circle around the naked models with their cameras at hardly two feet distance made me feel a bit uncomfortable. The resulting photographs are mostly soft-erotic, innocuous and a bit old-fashioned, they at least do not live up to the expectation that the magazine's name "Kink" seems to hint at.

This documentary doesn't seem to serve any purpose: it feels like some sort of ego-trip for the photographers without digging very deep into their lives and motives, and although we see all these naked models it never gets titillating or sensuous; thanks to the overlong duration (100 minutes!) it eventually even became a bit of a bore!

I can't help but feel that 50% or more of this documentary is just a pretext to film the naked guys during the photoshoots. It seems like it never ends and it seems like getting to know Paco and Manolo is not quite as important.

I gave up after the 6th (?) model. There is nothing about the process that shows me anything new about the two main characters.