Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency

Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency ❤️‍🔥, dir. Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, 2025, USA, 71 min.

Friday, June 20, 2025, 11:00 am, Roxie Theater
🌐 World premiere
This program will be available in the Digital Screening Room, June 23 through June 30, 2025, anywhere in the United States.
⚠️ Warning: This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and performance art

Playing with Fire: An
Ecosexual Emergency

Beth Stephens &
Annie Sprinkle

Annie Sprinkle is a familiar face to Frameline regulars from such films as Linda/Les & Annie — The First Female to Male Trans Love Story🔞 with the unforgettable line, “I sucked that clit like I had never sucked a man’s clit before — and indeed I never had.” Annie and her wife Beth Stephens moved to Boulder Creek, California (in the mountains just north of Santa Cruz), 20 years ago, enjoying the small town and the neighbors, many of whom rival Annie and Beth for quirkiness. They also began their own brand of “ecosexual” activism.

Then, in the summer of 2020, with the world still reeling from the Covid pandemic, a horrific drought and an unusual summer thunderstorm came together to ignite multiple massive wildfires, including the CZU Lightning Complex fires, which posed an unprecedented threat to the town of Boulder Creek, leading to a mandatory evacuation. Together, the CZU and other California wildfires that week burned an area larger than the state of Connecticut.

Annie and Beth see the increasing number of large wildfires as a symptom of our society being out of balance with nature, and specifically out of balance with fire. They consult some local Native Americans about their traditional perspective on fire, as well as connecting with other artists, activists, game designers (Why game designers? You’ll have to watch and find out!), firefighters, and a BDSM educator. We see some basic practical information, such as the need to control the undergrowth that fuels the rapid expansion of wildfires, using such complex technology as a herd of goats 🐐. The bottom line: California is going to have more frequent large wildfires unless we make some dramatic changes.

Annie and Beth also create a unique ritual to change their own perspective on fire, moving it from a feared enemy to a respected friend, capable of renewing as well as destroying, a part of a healthy natural world. They decide to “marry” Fire, in much the same vein as the ritual they did in their Green Wedding to the Earth in 2008. If we view the Earth itself as a partner and a lover, rather than as an inanimate pile of resources to exploit, we can begin to shift the future that we inextricably share with the planet itself.

You may dismiss Annie and Beth’s rituals as crunchy-granola woo, but the underlying point is solid: in the face of climate change, we need to substantially change how we relate to forests and fires and especially forest fires. So if their rituals don’t speak to you, find others that do, or create your own.

Must see.

• IMDb • trailer • official website • official website 2 •