Divine Deviance: the film that has not arrived yet

This page covers a documentary that does not exist yet, which requires saying so at the top rather than writing around it. Divine Deviance has been in development for about a decade. A funding trailer appeared in 2016. The project has changed shape at least twice since. No episode has been released.

That is not a reason to skip it. What the project has published, and the fact that it has taken this long, both say something useful about who gets to make films on this subject and on what terms.

What it is trying to be

The stated method is the thing worth attending to. The collective describes the work as made by, about and for the kink communities it covers, which is a direct rejection of the visiting-documentarian model. Everything else on this shelf was made by somebody who came in from outside, got access, and left. This proposes to remove the visit.

The earlier version of the plan was ambitious. Season one was to be organised by theme rather than by person, working through history, gender, race, spirituality, bodies, age and mainstreaming, with episodes running thirty to forty minutes and a feature-length opener. Each was to begin with a roundtable on the theme and then move into individual stories, mixing archival material, animation and observational footage.

The later version, announced in 2022 under the title Kink Is My Superpower, is smaller. Short films of twenty to thirty minutes, each following one or two people closely. The collective has said that casting and crew are in place for the first three, with more in preliminary casting.

That contraction from a thematic series to a set of character portraits is legible without any inside knowledge. It is what happens to an argumentative documentary project when the money does not come. Themes require a thesis and a lot of shooting. Portraits can be made one at a time as funds allow.

The book is the finished work

In September 2024 the collective published Kink Is: An Anthology of Surprisingly Relatable True Stories about Sex, Power, and Joy, through Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Margaret Cho. It runs about 290 pages and carries 66 photographs alongside first-person accounts gathered from the same research that was meant to feed the films.

Race Bannon, one of the producers, was candid about the sequence when the book was announced, writing that the collective was still working on the documentary series and was delighted to deliver the book in the meantime. A book is cheaper than a film. It also requires no distributor’s permission, which is part of the point.

The photographs are the part that bears most directly on this site. A picture of a person made by somebody inside their world, for an audience that includes them, is a different object from a picture made by a visitor for a gallery, and the difference is usually visible in the eyeline and in what the subject is doing with their face. The precedent is Nan Goldin, whose work is the strongest existing argument that the insider position changes the photograph rather than merely changing the caption.

What the method might fix

Set the proposal against the two finished films on this shelf and the case for it is clear enough.

In Kink, everyone who speaks is on the payroll of the company being examined, so the film’s assurances come entirely from parties with an interest in them. Here the participants have no employer in the frame. In Beyond Vanilla, sixty people are sorted by practice and given ninety seconds each, so nobody develops. The short-film format gives one or two people the whole running time, which is the correct structural answer to that problem.

More importantly, a film addressed inward has no obligation to spend its first act establishing that its subjects are respectable. The reassurance structure exists because the presumed viewer is a sceptic who must be won over. Change the presumed viewer and the obligation lifts.

What the method will not fix

It will not automatically fix the flattening, and the title is the tell. Kink Is My Superpower is itself a reassurance claim, and a strong one. Superpower is a flattering frame, and flattering frames edit as heavily as hostile ones do. A project that begins from the premise that this is a source of strength has committed in advance to a particular kind of story, and the people whose experience of it is more ambivalent, more compulsive, or simply duller will fit that premise badly.

There is a second tension in the credits. Fockele’s television background is in formats built around transformation and uplift. That is a real craft and it is not disqualifying, but it is a house style with a strong pull toward the redemptive arc, and the redemptive arc is precisely the shape that flattens this material.

What its absence demonstrates

The most instructive fact about Divine Deviance is the comparison with the film at the top of this shelf. Kink went from a tour of a building to a Sundance premiere in about two years, on the strength of a famous producer attaching his name. Divine Deviance has spent roughly a decade fundraising through a nonprofit sponsor and has released a book instead.

Both projects concern the same subject. One was made about a community by people passing through, with a celebrity attached, and it got a festival slot and distribution. The other is being made by the community and cannot get financed. Whatever conclusions the finished films eventually support, the difference in how far each got is already evidence about which accounts of this subject the industry is willing to pay for.

If episodes appear, this page will be rewritten to describe them. Until then the honest thing is to record a project, a method, a book and a decade of unfunded development, and to keep the film column’s assessment where it belongs, which is on work that can actually be watched.