The first non-adult film by Pornhub

The biggest pornographic website in the world Pornhub is ready to step up its game and released its first-ever non-adult film. The film is Shakedown, a documentary by Leilah Weinraub that explores the hidden world of black lesbian strip-clubbing in Los Angeles. The film will be streaming for free for the entire month of March before hitting broadcast on the Criterion Channel, and, finally, the iTunes store by summer. 

Shakedown, that premiered at Berlin Film Festival back in 2018, is a "stream of consciousness" exploring the underground scene of Los Angeles lesbian clubbing, alternating video-interviews with exclusive footage from the backstages. But 'Shakedown' was also the name of a series of parties for Afro-American lesbians that in the early 2000s became a crucial place for the queer subculture and the free expression of the female sexuality and desire. Weinraub has worked on this film for more than 15 years (2002-2017 circa). The project collected more than 400 hours of footage, a digital archive and a huge collection of photographies - and it hopes to engage mainly Pornhub's female users. 

“There’s a cool opportunity right now to present films in the art space, there’s more openness to diversity and content, and a different sort of storytelling”, Weinraub said, who's a filmmaker and a conceptual artist (she was also the CEO and creative director for the prêt-à-porter Hood By Air) and whose project has enjoyed a prestige rollout in exhibits at the Whitney Museum and MoMA over the last three years. 

“This film is part of a larger general commitment Pornhub has to supporting the arts", said Pornhub’s brand director Alex Klein; "We want to be seen as a platform that artists and creators can use. We’ve seen artists in general upload content to the site, that might not have a home at places like YouTube or Vimeo, who don’t permit nudity. For us, premiering a feature-length film is a first.” 

It's not the first time that Pornhub tries new roads: last November it released Her & Him, a short movie directed by model and former Disney Channel-rising star Bella Thorne (Disney's students never disappoint us, as we've learned from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers).

Pornhub is a worldwide legend and in 2019 has had 115 million visits per day, 39 billion unique searches for the year and 1.36 million hours of new content uploaded. That translates to 169 years worth of content to watch. There's a new competitor in the town of streaming - and it's already the strongest one.