Pain Is...

Steve Dwoskin is more able to take his life into his own hands than any other. A film about pain is therefore also about his own pain, even of the pain he has not asked for; showing us the pain of masochistic games as well as that of illness and accident. In that sense, Dwoskin´s film may be even more controversial than Cronenberg´s “Crash”, because in his quest for many kinds of pain, Dwoskin does not make any distinction between wanted and unwanted pain. Nor does he take notice of existing academic and medical opinions about cruelty, pain and suffering. His follows his own intuition, sharpened by life with a handicap and by an uninhibited investigation of sexual proclivities. In this way, the film tackles every possible kind of pain, from the very simple to the extremely complex, from realistic to imagined, and from accidental to pleasurable. Pain, just like love, is seen by Dwoskin as one of the fundamental human experiences. Pain is our humanity, our weakness, but also our strength. Pain is something we all know, but cannot really comprehend. Pain is...