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A cunning and innovative mix of media, Anders Morgenthaler’s debut feature is a rich and strange investigation into the complex moral issues surrounding pornography, blending anime with live action to devastating effect and exploiting each formats visual language to its maximum emotional impact. 

The story follows August, a solemn clergyman, newly returned to his native Denmark to attend the funeral of his younger sister Christina. Better known to her public as ‘Princess’, Christina was a hugely successful but troubled porn star, and has left behind a daughter, five year old Mia, in the care of a haggard old brothel owner. Horrified by Mia’s situation and her irreversible loss of innocence, August takes her into his care and vows to protect her from a cruel and seedy world. But consumed by guilt, grief, and hatred of those who profited from his sister’s slide into oblivion, August decides to avenge Christina’s death by destroying every piece of pornographic material bearing her name. This largely symbolic act soon turns into a brutal crusade as August explodes into violent vigilantism with bloody and tragic results.

Compassionate, complex, and extremely stylish, Morgenthaler’s film takes a very modern moral conundrum – the liberal and mainstream acceptance of pornography – and addresses the human cost of what has become one of largest industries in the world. From the opening title sequence of mass produced ‘Princess’ posters and DVD covers tumbling from a production line, the film’s thematic and formal project is laid out: sex as commodity, and the strange clash of the ‘real’ (the DVD covers are photographs, not animation) and the ‘unreal’ (the anime that makes up 80% of the film.).  Every time we see Christina it is in ‘real’ home video footage, yet August, Mia and their bloody quest for vengeance is portrayed completely in animation. This strategy is at once poetic, metaphorical and challenging: Morgenthaler seems to be asserting that to consume pornography, one must be able to abstract themselves from the human exploitation taking place behind the scenes. By choosing to mix abstract animated images with live action, his film investigates these moral questions in a wholly original way.