Partners Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the many aspects of fire in latest documentary
PLAYING WITH FIRE: AN ECOSEXUAL EMERGENCY (Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, 2025)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 10, 7:30
Sunday, October 11, 4:00
anthologyfilmarchives.org
sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu
There’s an important warning at the start of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency: “This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality, and performance art.”
It sure does.
In the film, longtime life and professional partners Sprinkle, a former sex worker turned feminist performance artist and sex educator, and Stephens, an artist, filmmaker, and art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explore both the beneficial and detrimental aspects of fire. The topic became forefront in their minds after they survived the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire of 2020; not everyone in their tight-knit community of Boulder Creek, California, was so fortunate.
In such chapters as “The Inferno,” “The Return,” and “Some Like It Hot,” they meet with a wide range of people who work with fire, from ceramicists Laurie and Dan Hennig, musicians Kate Freeman and Hillary Kay, and permaculturalist Aaron Allen to Forestry & Fire Recruitment Program cofounder Brandon Smith, artistic directors and curators Melonie and Melorra Green, and burlesque queen Lady Monster. Fire is seen as a necessary part of the Earth as it is used in rituals, art, weddings, and healing.
Therapist and witch Deborah Oak shares her “10 Top Tips for Staying Sane in Insane Times.” Indigenous sustainability professor Melissa Nelson explains, “Fire is a destroyer, it’s a great destroyer, but it’s a great regenerator.” Artists and game designers Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou and Huntrezz Janos display one of their projects as the latter says, “We want to showcase pleasure in a world of pain, and we want to help people dealing with catastrophe and survival.”
After her house is completely destroyed, Agz Rags owner Agnes De Lucchi says, “More than my own home, I worried about the trees.”
Sprinkle and Stephens, whose previous films include Water Makes Us Wet, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, and Playing in the Garden, also introduce us to their dog, Butch, and their remarkable white peacock, Albert, who became a symbol of Boulder Creek’s resilience. Their positive outlook on life is infectious, and more than a little woo-woo, as they delve into the connection between environmental fires and social fires through a trans rights march, playful animation (including animals talking and texting), discussions of consumption, and, ultimately, cremation.
“Not only do we believe that art can help our society evolve, we also believe in the power of love and pleasure,” Beth says, getting to the heart of ecosexuality.
Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is screening October 10 at 7:30 and October 11 at 4:30 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “The Cinema of Gender Transgression”; Sprinkle and Stephens will perform the ten-minute “Ecosex 101” before each show. In addition, they will participate in a Q&A with Urban Tantra and The Book of Ecstasy author Barbara Carrellas on October 10 and A Body to Live In director Angelo Madsen on October 11; there will also be a reception and book signing on Sunday, celebrating the milestone birthdays of adult entertainment legends Veronica Vera and Veronica Hart, cofounders of the pornstar support group Club 90. Attendees are strongly encouraged to dress up in fire or ecosex costumes for both screenings.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]