Truly Naked
Muriel d’Ansembourg on her glorious porn-industry-love-story
Back in February, I met Dana (a beloved mentor of mine) in a Utrecht coffee shop where we caught up on all things film and criticism. I told her about Obscenes and, supportive as she has always been, she said “You have to see this film!” No details were shared, for Dana (like myself) is not a plot person, but a feelings person – she mentioned the director was a Dutch woman who was certainly one to watch and that the film was something special. Aptly titled Truly Naked, the film is a debut for Muriel d’Ansembourg, and premiered at this year’s Berlinale Perspectives. It’s officially my favourite British film of the year, even if it’s a co-production between The Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
Truly Naked starts in the middle of a sex scene, a porn shoot of hardcore fucking splashed in gold paint – an exquisite aesthetic of cum dripping over the textured covered skin of Lizzie (Alessa Savage, a captivating sex worker who also starred in d’Ansembourg’s 2024 Tribeca short Fuck-a-Fan). Lizzie, turns out, is the recurring star in low-budget porn films directed, produced by and starring Dylan (Andrew Howard), whose teenage son Alec (Caolán O'Gorman) is the camera operator. We meet Alec as soon as the opening scene wraps up and it takes a few minutes for the film to make the nature of this family business completely clear. It’s a unique situation and a great story vehicle, but not in any way you’d expect. Muriel d’Ansembourg has written a beautifully rich script that is funny and empathetic, but most of all it takes pornography seriously without making the whole film be just about that. At once backdrop and an unlikely meeting ground, the porn business welcomes a first love story. Alec and his fierce classmate Nina (Safiya Benaddi) find their own path towards each other in the delightfully tender, truthfully horny, and ideologically complex film-world of Truly Naked. Oh, and there is an octopus sex scene which I felt was there solely for me and my hentai fetish.
I reached out to d’Ansembourg as soon as I saw the film and she was gracious enough to talk to me at length. This is a condensed, edited version of our chat, but I promise this is not the only time you’ll be hearing from me (and her) on the topic. Truly Naked recently won awards at Transilvania IFF and New Directors Fest 2026. It has both US and UK distribution, so stay tuned!
Savina: What struck me from the very first minutes of your film is that it does operate on two levels by mixing what the camera sees and the ‘behind the scenes’. And what we get to see as well as a product like it starts as almost a porn film. And then we move to the point of view shot of the camera operator. Why were you drawn to the meeting of those two worlds?
Muriel: It was very important to me to introduce characters who are human and not only humanly flawed, but also humanly beautiful. No one is black and white, we all have grey areas as well, and so do my characters. Take mainstream porn, for example, there’s a lot of objectifying going on which makes it easy to distance yourself — you don’t really engage with the people in it. Most of the time they don’t feel real. You barely get a sense of who they are and what they feel. That’s why I created characters who felt very real, whether you’re watching them in a porn scene, which feels, looks, and sounds exactly like one, or taking a selfie. Suddenly, you see them wiping themselves, having a cup of tea, laughing – being human. In the end, this whole film is about misunderstanding and understanding one another, objectifying versus truly seeing another person. On or off camera.
There’s a scene at the end where the camera is no longer needed – I found this a generous gesture, to provide privacy in a world where we’re surrounded by images, not just porn. We’re used to thinking about cinema at its most affective in handheld close-ups, so to deny the viewer that seems like a big gift.
Oh, that’s nice to hear! That’s what’s interesting about cinema, that you can inhabit a world that otherwise you might never have been part of. Also, you connect with characters as soon as you get to know more about them. Once you know people, it’s much harder to judge them.
We’re experiencing the adult entertainment industry through the eyes of teenagers who are also carving a space for themselves within it. Why was it important to show a different relationship between teenagers and pornography, not a consumer-product one?
People often talk about how bad porn is for teenagers, but they forget to mention that there are many different kinds of porn. Most of what you can watch for free is mainstream, industrial porn , the different [’ethical’] kind is often behind a paywall. It makes a lot of sense that teenagers look for answers on the internet, you want to figure it all out, especially when you realize the whole world is obsessed with sex. At the same time, there’s a lot of shame surrounding sex, which makes it confusing for any (pre)teen. With experience, grown-ups develop a shield of sorts. But as a teenager, you’re so raw — every nerve ending exposed. Alec is very much an introvert and keeps it all inside to protect himself, but the work he does with his dad is obviously traumatic. He hides behind the camera, where he feels secure. Focusing on the [shooting] technique distances him from what’s going on in front of the camera, and inside himself.
But that one sex scene he isn’t filming, reveals a lot about the power dynamics both him and Nina are trying to negotiate. It’s the one where Nina walks in wearing a strap-on, to the disbelief of Alec and his dad. Can you talk me through writing such an emotionally nuanced episode?
A few things are interesting in that scene. At first, Alec laughs when Nina enters wearing the strap-on. He and his dad are high, having a laugh, smoking a joint, until the whole situation turns uncomfortable for him. He hadn’t expected to see Nina in the sexual role other women play in front of his camera. But it becomes extremely uncomfortable when his dad goes along with the domination. Nina is making him do what he does to other women while we know from the previous scene that “he won’t have a cock anywhere near his asshole, not even his own,” which refers to the replica dildo he ‘s so proud of.
It’s obvious that Alec and Nina experienced this situation in very distinct ways, that are not just simply gender-biased.
On the one hand, she’s confronting him, implying that ‘This is what you make other girls do.’ You can see she’s trying to be calm and cool, but she’s hiding her nerves and clenching her fists behind her back as she tells Alec’s dad to “suck it”. When I was writing that scene, I didn’t think it would be that uncomfortable to watch. Empowering and daring, maybe, but not as uncomfortable as it turned out to be to some viewers. Alessa Savage, who plays Lizzie, pointed out that the scene shows how, with the right makeup, outfit, and attitude, many of us could be transformed like that.
I thought that if she didn’t look the part, nor performed the part, he probably wouldn’t have accepted her domination. This is saying something really profound about male submission.
That’s interesting, although I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying it’s about male submission as a whole. The way he grins and tells her to get on her knees, he is still trying to be the one in control. While what Nina is doing is holding up a mirror to his hypocrisy. It’s funny because the very first time I showed that clip during a talk I gave, way before the film was released, there were some women in the audience who cheered Nina on. When she came into the scene and said, “suck it,” they were like, wooohoo!
Yes. I relate to this.
It was always men, by the way, who found this extremely uncomfortable.
I guess this is a version of the question, like how do you know and how far to push it to? For example, the octopus scene…
From early on, people kept saying, “This is a daring scene. It’s a heavy scene. Are you sure you want to do this? It’s going to create a lot of controversy.” To which I kept replying that it’s important, because it has to be something extreme to make Alec stop working for his father. Otherwise, he is not going to leave. He’s too dependent and loyal; he’s used to so much already, so it needs to be something grotesque. I fought for that scene. When we finally got to it, my DP Myrthe Mosterman and I were so worried the octopus wouldn’t look real enough. Honestly, I spent sleepless nights worrying people in the cinema would laugh at how ridiculous and silly it would look. And then the opposite happened: People were horrified by it. It’s terrifyingly real. Some tried to look away, but they could still hear the sounds. It stayed with them long after leaving the cinema. And then I realised: “Wow, that’s the opposite of our worries.”
It was particularly affecting to me, as a fan of that kind of hentai porn, but there’s something unsettling about the realism and crossing the fantasy line and over into reality…
We knew the scene would be hard for a lot of people to watch, an octopus isn’t an animal you expect to see in that setting. But it was definitely supposed to be confronting. I remember Alessa pointing out that if we’d gone with an extreme sex scene with men instead, extreme enough for Alec to finally say “no, enough!” it would have been one involving multiple men and, of course, be extremely violent. She said, “I’m not sure if that would have been the better route.” And thinking from the perspective of the father, an octopus is far more interesting because he’s someone who chases the unique thrill and whatever would make people click on the video. To me, that is completely in his character: not thinking things through before he actually has to deal with the consequences. In the beginning of the scene, it’s almost funny, and then it becomes very uncomfortable – like the dildo fight between Alec and his dad which quickly turns dark. Both scenes share that trajectory of “Oh, this is funny and weird” to “Oh, wait a minute, there’s an undercurrent.” I find that really exciting to create [in a scene].
In terms of the actual porn scenes and the acts and the sexuality, how did you choose what exactly to portray? Now I’m guessing there was probably other stuff that didn’t make it into the film that we’re now seeing. But it does serve the characters. It gives us a very good idea from the very beginning like who the father is, like what are his tastes, why does he work so well with Lizzie? These things we get a sense of them but what was it like for you choosing which kind of scenes and dynamics to portray?
I was looking for the type of pornography that, at least according to my standards, lacks intimacy. It was a way to contrast what these two teenagers go through—their first love and first experience of sexuality—to have them fall in love in an opposite setting. So much of mainstream porn is focused on genitalia and penetration, with hardly any kissing, no mention of consent… Having these two very different worlds meet in the same setting was inspiring to me: who would have thought that young people could have a gentle love affair on a porn set? However, this is not meant to represent the industry as a whole — it’s a very specific, fictional situation. But as soon as you touch on a subject like pornography, people are predisposed to read it as if it is.
People would demand a film like this to be a manual or a cautionary tale, nothing in between.
Yes. That’s the one thing that I’ve also found tricky, reminding people this is not a film about pornography or working in the sex industry. Truly Naked is about a pretty unique family situation in a way and [pornography] is the backdrop. It’s true that a lot of the teenagers I spoke to got their sexual education through the internet and [mainstream] porn, which made me come up with this story. But the film is still a fiction piece. You can get lost in fiction and that’s okay: a film doesn’t need to tell you what’s morally right or wrong, that’s not what I’m trying to do. I hope the film gets people talking about the topics it covers, including consent. I don’t expect it to have all the answers of what sex should be like and how teenagers should behave, or how life should be. Life is fucking messy and sex is messy, especially the first time. Not everything needs to be neatly resolved. Not in life, and not in film.