DARK SIDE OF PORN: SEARCH FOR ANIMAL FARM 2 OF 3

DARK SIDE OF PORN: ANIMAL FARM PART 2 OF 3

In April 2006, the UK station Channel Four Television screened a fifty-minute documentary, The Search For Animal Farm, as part of their Dark Side of Porn season. Several interviewees, including David Kerekes (co-author of Killing For Culture and See No Evil), author Phil Tonge, feminist writer Germaine Greer and British pornographer Ben Dover, all confessed to having seen bootlegs of Animal Farm in the 1980s, but were apparently unaware that there was no such film - the entity referred to as such was merely a number of existing bestiality shorts tacked together.

Tonge described the owner of the copy he saw as an "evil, evil scumbag" and recalled how several "hard lads" either "left the room" or "vomited", Dover remarked that owning the bootleg was a useful aid to games of one-upmanship, since nothing could top the onscreen depravity of Joensen and her co-stars, and the normally easy-going Kerekes was moved to remark that "you can only wallow in filth for so long, and Animal Farm represents the very bottom of the barrel". Its impact on viewers was compared to that of hearing for the first time about the Kennedy assassination.

The documentary also told the sad story of Bodil Joensen, a psychologically traumatized young woman whose brief notoriety as the 'Queen of Bestiality' was followed by a downward spiral of alcohol abuse and prostitution before her death of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty, and featured an interview with the Danish pornographer Ole Ege.

The 1970 documentary, A Summer's Day, apparently formed at least some of the content of the Animal Farm bootleg, having been shown at the "Wet Dreams" pornography film festival beforehand.