LONDON — An award-winning documentary profiling gay adult film star Jonathan Agassi will play the BFI Flare 2019 film festival next month.
The festival unspools March 21-31. “The list of films showing at the festival this year numbers a grand total of 52 titles, bringing LGBTQ+ stories and talent to the big screen,” a rep said.
Receiving the Centerpiece Screening slot is director Tomer Heymann’s “Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life,” which screens twice, March 22 and 23.
"When a fresh-faced Jonathan Agassi hit the international gay porn scene in the late 2000s, he blew everyone else out of the water. Nothing short of a sensation, Agassi experienced a meteoric rise to fame, quickly becoming one of the most popular and prolific adult superstars in the business. Dividing his time between Berlin and Tel Aviv, Agassi supported his film career with live porn shows and escort work, making claims to have the best job in the world. But Agassi the performer and Agassi the person are two very different entities, and his euphoric professional highs were frequently countered by crushing personal lows,” reads the festival’s summary of the film.
"Bolstered by the unconditional support of his mother Anna, Agassi questions the nature of his fame and interrogates his self-destructive tendencies as he searches for a sense of happiness that continues to elude him. In his latest documentary, acclaimed filmmaker Heymann (‘Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?’) paints a fascinating portrait of a young man wrestling with loneliness, addiction and childhood traumas, and offers a probing, but never damning, insight into an industry that seems to promise so much."
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"Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life” was awarded Best Israeli Documentary Film prize from the Jerusalem Film Festival (click here for details) and Agassi was subsequently profiled by venerable Israeli newspaper Haaretz (click here).
Find Agassi on Instagram and follow the BFI Flare festival on Twitter.
