For 11 years, a film event with a quirky name – the Festival du film de fesses ("Festival of Sex Flicks") – has invited cinephiles to take a different look, not at pornographic cinema, but at erotic cinema, which became a genre in its own right in the 1960s.

Expressive titles like L'Éternité pour nous (Eternity for Us) and Le Concerto de la peur (Night of Lust), as well as seasoned directors such as Russ Meyer, José Bénazéraf and Max Pécas − all combined with the inclusion of sex scenes − made the genre famous. Eroticism subsequently had its golden age in the 1970s with the release of Emmanuelle (Just Jaeckin, 1974), which remained on the Champs-Élysées marquee for over a decade.

The glory days of this style of cinema are now over. Films not classified as X-rated have begun to include increasingly daring scenes, while pornographic cinema has shifted to online platforms. It was in this in-between space that, in 2014, the Festival du film de fesses emerged, aiming to celebrate "all sexualities, relationships, identities and break down genre barriers," explained its co-founder, Anastasia Rachman. She described erotic cinema as "a cinema of sensations, but without a masturbatory goal."

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