The director of the upcoming lesbian romance Maya & Samar has pushed back against the film’s NC-17 rating.
On 4 November, the film – which stars Nicolette Pearse and Amanda Babaei Vieira, made its world premiere at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
Written by Tamara Faith Berger, Maya & Samar explores the “explosive” love affair between the titular characters following a spark-filled, fateful encounter.
Maya is “a rising journalist covering sex and pop culture at a hip indie website”, and Samar is “a queer Afghan woman living in Greece after a harrowing escape from the Taliban.”
The synopsis adds: “That romance exposes the fault lines between their conflicting cultures, with Maya – a young, liberal Westerner whose freewheeling lifestyle is propped up by her unexamined privilege – coming face to face with a woman for whom even love is an act of resistance.”
In a recent interview with Variety, the film’s director, Anita Doron, opened up about all things Maya & Samar, including her disappointment with the Motion Picture Association’s decision to give the movie an NC-17 rating.
“The fact that we got an NC-17 rating, even though this film is a love story, but many other films – where it’s not a queer love story – [don’t] get an NC-17 rating, was… shocking,” she told the news outlet.
Doron went on to defend the movie’s sexual content, describing the characters’ love scenes as a “celebration of the joy and sacredness of their sexuality, of their shared sexual experience.”
When discussing Maya and Samar’s intricate relationship, the screenwriter of The Breadwinner exclaimed that their romance is “not just an affair” but rather a “reckoning that holds a mirror up to the illusions of the saviour, and to the truths we prefer avoiding.”
“Ever since I started making films, I’ve been waiting and dying to tell stories where female fantasy sexuality is not a decoration or a titillation for the audiences, but it’s a story from within the experience and the characters,” Doron added. “[Maya and Samar’s love] is chaotic and poetic, and it’s alive.”
Doron isn’t the only director of an LGBTQIA+ led film to call out the MPAA for its rating decisions.
During a 2023 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Passages director Ira Sachs slammed the association for labelling it NC-17, stating that it would be “a very different film” if he were to edit and resubmit it for evaluation.
“There’s no untangling the film from what it is. It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie,” he explained to the publication.
“We hunger for movies that are in any proximity to our own experience. And to find a movie like this, which is then shut out, is, to me, depressing and reactionary.
“It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBTQ+ imagery to exist.”
Passages distributor, Mubi, echoed similar sentiments in a separate statement, stating that the NC-17 rating “suggests the film’s depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is so false.”
As for the MPAA, they defended their decision in their own statement, adding that “the sexual orientation of a character or characters is not considered as part of the rating process.”
As of this writing, the MPAA has not addressed Doron’s comments.
The new issue of Gay Times, featuring Khalid and more, is out now – available exclusively to subscribers
Latest
