The Daughters of Fire

This is the real deal. Bold and unapologetic; poetic, assured, and completely realised. Its themes and ideas are conveyed with fierce cogency. It takes a complex question - essentially: can pornography be truly empowering to women? - and essays it with a verve that gave me a similar feeling to the first viewing of an at-his-peak Godard film.

It is intellectually thrilling, but emotionally moving, too. Treads the fine line between the intellectual and the base with grace. (Is it pornography? Is it meta-pornography?)

The Daughters of Fire is formally inventive and philosophically incisive in a way that should embarrass the usual male edgelord provocateurs, would that had shame.

This is the first time I can say I watched a movie with *zero* concession to the male gaze. I felt, as a man, that this film made no concessions for me. I felt refreshingly irrelevant as a viewer.

I expect many men, should they bother to watch it at all, may feel threatened by this film. I suspect this film will prove resilient. If films can be important and meaningful to the world - and of course they can - then The Daughters of Fire is as significant as they come (no pun intended).

It's an extraordinary achievement. Given the film's radically ambitious aims - to examine representation of (queer) women's bodies, paradigms of female pleasure, and the integration of eroticism, pornography and poetry into a structurally feminist worldview - it's bordering on the miraculous how great it is.