Filmin has released the documentary La Reina del Porno, an x-ray of the New York counterculture figure Chelly Wilson, one of the leaders of the porn industry in the 70s, whose story could not be more different than what her profession might suggest. . In less than an hour and a half, the film explores the life of this Greek woman, who was a lesbian but loved her husband and raised her children in Christianity despite being Jewish. A set of fascinating contradictions for a biography told by one of the box-office hits at one of her cinemas, the director Valerie Kontakos, who knew her closely at the age of 16.
Kontakos explains to cineuropa Wilson’s influence on his career, and how meeting her led him to film her biography. “Her independence, self-confidence, and strength struck me as a teenager, as it was so important to find a woman who could be on her own and manage her life the way she wanted. Her talent was the ability to stand her ground and feel good. With Herself”. In the context of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the rise of feminism and gay pride, Wilson was not a visible head of the very conventional movement, and today she could be viewed critically by the most hegemonic factions, but her success defines perfection the break with the conventions imposed even by new cultural dogmas.
The Queen of Porn begins with her grandchildren remembering how their grandmother was the center of attention at every gathering. Combining home recordings, interviews with friends and family, and archival footage from New York, the film traces life and a career full of revelations, as she always kept a certain mystery around her and many secrets, even from those closest to her. Born in Thessaloniki in 1908, Chelly had a very religious Jewish upbringing until her father arranged a marriage that she abhorred, going so far as to say that every kiss from the man made her “want to kill him.”
After having two children, she managed to arrange a divorce, but in 1939, when war broke out in Europe, she had to leave Greece without custody of her son, leaving her daughter Paulette to a completely unknown family acquaintance and to the one he made promise to protect her. She caught the last boat out of Athens shortly before the German occupation of her hometown and arrived in New York with just $5 in her pocket, which she invested in a Washington Heights neighborhood food stand. Surviving in Manhattan by being identified as Sephardic was difficult even in the US, and Chelly soon became part of the expatriate Jewish community, earning money selling peanuts and hot dogs on the street.
With money from the sale of street food, she managed to import the patriotic film Greece on the March, and she met the Jewish projectionist Rex Wilson, with whom she fell in love, among other things because he provided her with the brand of cigarettes that she missed. Thus, she managed to rebuild herself by adopting the surname that Rex himself had changed to Wilson to avoid discrimination, and she reinforced her support for emigrants from her country by importing more and more Greek films, reaching the point of raising money to send to anti-Nazi troops. But as the Greek film market declined, Wilson saw another opportunity in a new emerging market: adult films.
Starting with small projections, she soon saw possibilities and ended up owning several cinemas named after Greek gods such as Eros and Adonis, Venus or the Lido. By the time the 1970s rolled around, New York was broke, businesses and families were moving to suburbia, and crime was on the rise, but in the midst of that turmoil, the porn and sex shop business exploded. in Times Square, becoming the district’s source of income until Giuliani’s arrival. Wilson had laid the foundation to ride that wave from the top position, going from projecting softcore to hardcore porn, earning so much money that she had to bring cash to her apartment in shopping bags.
Soon she also began to produce films herself and fully entered the seedy environment of the area, playing poker with dubious characters, since throughout her career she crossed paths with the mafia and organized crime, because according to her granddaughter ” I loved people who knew how to talk and how to do things.” But she also enjoyed spending a lot of time with her family and expanding her options. Chelly opened a Greek restaurant called Mykonos and had her lover, singer Noni Kantaraki, perform there. She gradually stopped funding movies, and when the authorities began cracking down on theaters in the 1990s, she slowly moved away from the adult business, but by then she was a pioneering businesswoman who had broken taboos, becoming an unlikely matriarch. conventional.
Her story of survival is an example of empowerment, but it remains an alternative version of the cultural history of feminism and the rise of the gay liberation movement. Gay pornography was always present in its factory, making Adonis one of its epicenters at a time when its visibility was even more clandestine, however, the current association of the industry with exploitation offers another aspect to the Wilson’s figure, which according to the director, is not a thing of today. “In the eyes of many people, she was a gloomy person and not very respectable. Some of those around her did not want to participate. This is happening even now, years after her death.”
The queen of porn does not follow the mechanisms of the classic biopic, but rather tries to convey Chelly’s personality as Kontakos met her. For this, he has also used some animation sequences that illustrate some of his exploits with sketches by Abhilasha Dewan and the objective of turning her into a living character, mixing some real audio in a hybrid that recovers the spirit of the underground comic that defined the other part of the culture in those years.
Worthy of Peter Bagge’s vignette biographies of pioneering libertarian women, the documentary is a portrait of a profile of a feminist, progressive, liberated and independent who personifies that in the United States the self-made entrepreneur does not understand preconceived ideological routes.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
