SEXUAL HEALING Feminism, Porn and Self-acceptance in Morgana

Morgana (Isabel Peppard & Josie Hess, 2019) recounts the true story of a middle-aged, clinically depressed housewife who reinvents herself into an internationally award-winning auteur known as ‘Morgana Muses’. Boundary-pushing and explicit – and this documentary is certainly explicit – it seems, at first, to be a fairly classic narrative of self-actualisation: an inspiring feminist liberation story with a sex-positive, age-positive heroine. But, over several years of filming, and through close, respectful collaboration with their subject, Peppard and Hess succeed in painting a much more nuanced portrait, one with an important mental-health message: that real life and real art require repeated transformations and reinventions – or even rebirths – especially when the cycles of bipolar disorder are involved.

The film opens with Morgana walking into Australian bushland, scouting for a location. Wearing spectacles and jeans and carrying a clipboard, she’s businesslike as she chats with her young, female cinematographer in sparkly red pants and bright pigtails. This happens to be Hess, a filmmaker who also works intimately with Morgana, shooting and editing the latter’s erotic films. Wandering through the bush, they’re looking for a hole to bury Morgana in. The mood is buoyant but nervous as she jokes that she doesn’t care what outfit she’s buried in, as long as it involves ‘gorgeous shoes’. Another woman, this time in head-to-toe gothic black, enters the picture and stands by the makeshift grave, hands