After Work

Holger and Lutz meet after work for a sex date. After the two have undressed, it starts with oral sex on the sofa, as requested. At some point, however, they have to admit that today things are not going as planned – is it exhaustion at the end of a long day at work? And after all, they’re not so young anymore. After Work not only documents a sexual act that ultimately fails, but also invites us to participate in an interpersonal encounter in a private living space. And precisely because the protagonists also reveal themselves here in their vulnerability and their failure, this cinematic miniature has an always palpable human warmth and dignity.  

For over a decade, Jan Soldat has been shooting films of sexual portraits; there are already over one hundred of them. By encouraging his mostly gay protagonists to live out their sexuality in front of his camera and his gaze, he often gets amazingly close to them, creating long and short films of great humanistic warmth and intensity. While the filmmaker’s interest in the non-normative – in socially stigmatized or ridiculed fetishes or in bodies beyond conventional notions of sexual attractiveness – could easily be confused with a certain desire to provoke, Jan Soldat’s works have long since been assembled to form a steadily growing archive of everyday sexuality, in which his own curiosity is not an end in itself, but an instrument of empathetic curiosity and love for humanity. (Jochen Werner)  

Translated by John Wojtowicz