Erika Lust

Erika Lust (born 1977) is a Swedish erotic film director, screenwriter and producer.

Lust was born Erika Hallqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1977.

She harboured a passion for film and theatre.

She went to Lund University, where she studied Political Sciences.

While there, she came across Linda Williams' 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", which would influence her filmmaking later.

She graduated with a BA in 1999, with a specialization in human rights and feminism.

After graduation she moved to Barcelona in 2000 and started studying filmmaking.

Since the debut of her first indie erotic film The Good Girl in 2004, Lust has been cited as one of the current leading participants in the feminist pornography movement, asserting that an ethical production process sets her company apart from mainstream pornography sites.

Lust has stated that she finds no issue in calling her films porn, since she expects viewers to be sexually aroused, unlike other directors of erotic films who make a distinction between their work and porn even when both types contain sexually explicit scenes.

In addition to directing and producing a number of award-winning films, she has written several books.

Lust shot her first film, the explicit short The Good Girl in 2004, which became an instant hit.

Released online for free under a Creative Commons license, it was downloaded millions of times in several days and two million times in two months.

The film was shown at the Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival the next year and won a Ninfa Award.

In 2005, after this initial success, she founded her video production company Lust Films.

The company has produced erotic short films and compilations steadily from then on.

Five Hot Stories For Her, an anthology of five vignettes including The Good Girl, won the Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival's 2007 Best Spanish Screenplay award, the Venus Berlin Fair's 2007 Eroticline Award for Best Adult Film for Women, and the 2008 Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year.

Lust has written several books on eroticism and sexuality; her first book Good Porn was published in 2009 by Seal Press.

In it, she lists such common myths associated with ‘phony, predictable porn for men’, including: #2.

Men can always get it up; #6.

When a man is choking a woman with his dick, she always smiles and enjoys it; #7.

Beautiful young women just love to have sex with fat, ugly, middle-aged men; #13.

Every lesbian is tall, thin and pretty and has long hair and nails.

Lust runs an online store offering her books and films, as well as sex toys and other erotic wares.

In 2010, Lust opened an online erotic cinema called Lust Cinema, exhibiting her own films and those of other authors of the new wave of explicit films.

Her film Cabaret Desire (2011) won her the Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year in 2012 and the CineKink Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature.

She started the first crowdsourced project in the history of adult cinema in 2013, calling it XConfessions.

It has become her main source of work in the years thereafter.

It was cited as an example of the diversity of porn at the 2013 Berlin Porn Film Festival providing a space for rethinking sex, sexuality, and pornography.

In February 2016, her company had about 15 employees.

In 2017 Glamour Magazine listed Lust Cinema as one of the 15 Feminist Porn Sites That You’ll Really, Really Enjoy.

In 2017, in consultation with sex educators Lust created a porn-education website for parents, "The Porn Conversation".

The site provides links to research and tips for talking to kids about the unrealistic nature of mainstream porn.

In 2019 Erika was named as one of the BBC's 100 Most Influential Women of the Year.

Since then she has been a regular on the adult cinema festival circuit, and in 2020 one of her films came to the cinema in the regular process for the first time.

Lust's films are characterized by carefully cast actors and high standards of production in adult film.

Lust believes explicit film can be an educational tool besides being pleasurable and can help us better understand our sexuality, to live more freely and naturally.

She hopes to influence viewers' conceptions of gender roles in sexuality.

She considers pornography to be the "most important discourse on gender and sexuality".

In 2020, her film The Intern received three film nominations for the XBIZ Europa Awards including Feature Movie of the Year, Best Acting (won) and Best Sex Scene in a Feature Movie.

Her film Super Femmes was also nominated for Best Lesbian Sex Scene (won) and was the first time in the history of XBIZ Europa Awards where a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) or trans performer were nominated in a non-genre specific category.