The Pan Eros Film Festival sat down with the director of this year’s feature film The Heart of a Dominatrix, Inanna Justice, for a discussion on community building, filmmaking, and the late-night grind. Excerpts of the interview can be seen in the Theatrical Filmmaker Spotlight from this year! Full interview is below.
Interviewed by Brodin Petrichor
Transcription by Keri Grassl-Ziegler
PEFF: Inanna, please tell me a little bit more about who you are and where you’re from. I would love to hear a little bit more about you.
Inanna: Absolutely. My name is Inanna Justice, she/her pronouns, and I’m a Paris-based dominatrix and community organizer. I have a nonprofit organization called the Kinky Saloon France. We organize monthly play parties and a lot of workshops. I’m passionate about education. With my life and business partner and love partner, Jay Lincal, he’s been working in television for a really long time and we’ve been making shorts for the past four years. I started out just for fun as promo for my Domme business.
And then in 2022, I published a book called The Heart of a Dominatrix, which featured interviews with 21 Dommes around the world and then I got put in contact with Playboy TV Europe.
They asked me to make a film. Actually, the project that I pitched was a mini series on dominatrices around the world. I wanted to go interview women or femme identifying Dommes in their spaces, see how they play and find out why they’re doing what they do. Playboy loved the idea, but they said that I had to start with my own film, which was a challenge for me, putting myself in the spotlight. So that’s how The Heart of a Dominatrix came about.
After being inspired by going to so many wonderful festivals like Pan Eros and then a lot of festivals in Europe, I’ve decided to start a erotic film festival because there’s no international erotic film festival in Paris. Kind of a feminist femme-forward festival in January of 2027. That’s the very quick version of the background of who I am and what I’m doing here.
PEFF: It’s not easy doing a documentary. How did you start doing this? What was that rhythm of going from place to place?
Inanna: It was really a challenge on a lot of different levels. First off, because we didn’t have a budget, this is an extremely low budget film. So that always puts a lot of roadblocks in our way. But because we travel a lot for festivals already, showing our shorts for example, and because we love community, myself and Jay, we really enjoy meeting other filmmakers, meeting other people that are making erotic art. It’s really important for us to travel anyway. So we traveled with a camera to try to double down. That’s why you see me at a lot of different festivals.
Thankfully, we had a lot of archival footage of me because I’m a total exhibitionist. We have stuff of me sitting in front of my computer. And then at the end of The Heart of a Dominatrix, there’s a lot of footage of my event, France FemDom, which is the first international feminine domination event in France, which happened in 2024 and 2025. So we were trying to capitalize on the fact that we’re busy bodies, that I’m running around all the time, that I’m attending a lot of festivals, that I’m speaking at conferences, that I’m engaging in the BDSM kink community regularly. That’s what made this film possible. And that’s what let us build such a rich film with almost no budget.
I’m very lucky that Jay is incredibly talented. Because he’s also my life partner, he has an ability to capture some of the more intimate moments that I think are important for us to show, particularly a lot of people’s vision of feminine domination or female domination. In my case, I call it feminine domination. Their view of it is the latex clad, whip wielding, ice queen. And I really wanted to show literally the heart behind what we do, that there’s a lot of work behind sex work.
PEFF: I think you do such a great job showcasing the warmth of femdom. There’s a lot of different types of shots which keeps the film so visually interesting, all interspersed within and weaves into the story well. The teapot scene with the service sub. Everything about that shot with the way he walks in, it’s just so deliberate and smooth. I really enjoyed that.
Inanna: Yeah, that was his precious little baby of the film. That shot with the sub with the teapot with Amaury walking into the room, like you said, very slowly, very deliberately, a lot of attention, a lot of intention, also which is something that’s really important for me in my practice of feminine domination. So I think that scene really captures a lot of what’s going on, the details visually for the film, but also in the practice. It speaks volumes.
Documentary filmmaking is not easy. And it’s very different from the fictions that we do, and especially short format. Short format films are where we have 5-12 minutes of really high impact; keeping a steady rhythm that keeps the viewer engaged, but also gives them enough time to pause and think about what they just watched. The documentary format is a real challenge. And now we’re embarking on the mini series that I wanted to do from the beginning. We’re doing a six episode mini series about Dommes in Europe, which will be out at the end of 2027.
Keeping that in mind going into the project: how can we keep this momentum? How can we keep the viewer engaged, and also slow down and be intentional in what we’re saying?
I’m pretty lucky to be surrounded by incredible people. Lady Vyra in Berlin, the interviews that I did. A lot of these people are friends that I’ve known for quite some time: Midori and Alexandra Balance, the interviews near the end, Peter Cage, who I met in Berlin. So I’m very, very fortunate to have people that I admire that have things to say that really have thought about their practice. That really helps keep a rhythm also. These little snippets, these little gems of those of us that practice intentionally in kink.
PEFF: Community is such a big draw for a lot of people who are interested in the space, and community is what keeps them in the community. You’re doing a series after this. Are you highlighting different aspects of the community with each episode or is it focused on a specific person or profile? What’s that going to look like?
Inanna: It is going to be focused on six Dommes. I’ve got four that are confirmed and two others are almost confirmed, and it will be focused around each of these women and their practice. I really wanted to select women that have projects outside of the dungeon.
For example, Madame Lula, is a Parisian dominatrix. She’s also a writer. She’s a really, really incredible writer. A lot of her style goes into a more creative aspect. We see it in her dungeon, also in her style, she’s very involved in the community as well.
In Berlin, Lady Velvet Steel, who organizes a lot of events, very pro sex work, very militant. So it’s important for me to show women that aren’t just spanking booties in the dungeon, which we love to do of course, but that also have other engagements outside of the cut-and-dry work aspect of femdom. Community is so important. And that’s something that really brought me and Jay together at the beginning of our relationship. Our core kink is building communities.
I ran a pro-domme munch for about four years because I felt really isolated. I come from the lifestyle community. And when I started doing pay-for-play, I felt really isolated. It’s not the same thing. And so building that community led into building eventually the Kinky Saloon, which led into France FemDom. We also do the Paris Kinky Creators Hub, which is basically a munch for content creators, so for people that are in front of or behind the camera. So that’s something that’s super important for us in the real work of what we’re doing. Not just the job, but bringing people together and reuniting and sharing our passions, and loving and laughing together that is so important.
That was something that I tried to portray in the documentary was the importance of community, you know, what do we get from it? Because, yes, it’s great to play with your partner at home. That’s wonderful, and no shame at all. But, gosh, when you get out there, and you start asking questions, and people start asking you questions, and the wheels start turning. Oh, it’s exponential, the good personal growth is just exponential. So this idea with building community, it also goes into the mini series, it was part of the book.
Also, I was able to build a virtual community. When I published the book, it was right after the lockdowns. I decided to write the book, in any case, it was after being excluded from my community being cut off from the world, that I wanted to create a community. And that happened, the book writing process came about because we were completely isolated and stuck with online interaction. So the book was written through emails, basically. But that same idea of bringing that collective energy together is so important. And I’m always encouraging folks to get out there and find your community. If there’s a festival in your town, go. Go meet people, whether that’s a munch, whether that’s an online community, some people are limited to online communities, and there are some great ones. So get out there and meet people and talk to other kinksters.
PEFF: One thing I am really appreciative about with the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, is that it feels like Christmas, it’s a huge reunion.
One thing that is really shown in the documentary is your work ethic. Like nonstop. Not just you traveling all the time, but everything from the administrative side to the emotional energy side, and everything else. And you’re continuing to learn and build skills and build relationships. Where do you find the energy? How do you put yourself forward?
Inanna: I don’t sleep much. Quite honestly, I’m kind of hyperactive. I thrive on having a lot of different projects. I’m one of those people that the more projects I have, the more that I want to do. My creative energy comes from being active. I would not recommend it to just anyone, you really have to be extremely organized, extremely disciplined to be able to keep up the schedule because, I have the brand Inanna Justice, which is primarily sessions, I teach workshops, we have the nonprofit where I also teach workshops, I do coaching primarily for couples, but also for some single folks. We have JinkLab Creations, which is the video production company. I’ve also just started doing clip style content, so Clips4Sale/LoyalFans type content because I’m becoming more and more interested in film as a way of sharing my passion.
It has to be work that comes from your heart. You have to love it. To work at this level, I think you just have to be obsessed. I think that’s true for a lot of people that have success in an artistic field. I do see my job as art.
Most of us, it takes incredible discipline, it takes a lot of tears, it takes a lot of blood and sweat, and a lot of grinding your teeth and just doing it. A lot of failures also. A lot of, oh shit, moments where you go, “Well, I thought that was a good idea, maybe not.”
A lot of putting out fires. That’s the reality of it. It’s what we don’t see. You know that because you’re involved in a really big festival. You know that what goes on behind the scenes, you come out with your wonderful festival and people see all the glitz and the glam and that you’re showcasing these amazing films, but they don’t see the year of work that went in behind the scenes, the weekends that you spent with your team, how many hours you spent on Excel or in emails or communicating with filmmakers. I think that’s a really underrated part, particularly in sex work or sex related work, that’s very underestimated. I talk about it briefly in the film with photo shoots and planning and organization.
PEFF: Oh yes, the absolute labor that goes into this is invisible, but desperately essential.
Inanna: Desperately essential, yeah, absolutely.
PEFF: I want to hear more about the documentary process and the intimacy that you would need to pull from others. [For instance,] you’re interviewing others, you’re interviewing mostly friends, but sometimes it seems like there are people who are just there. There are people there in the workshops. How difficult is it to get people to showcase that private part of their lives? Were there a lot of discussions and negotiation needed or were people just saying, “Nope, I want to be in this movie. Let me in.”
Inanna: Truth be told, everybody that was in the workshop is a friend. That comes from my community because of consent reasons. I can’t film one of my traditional workshops. I can’t open up a workshop and just film. So, I asked my friends who are kinky. I said, “Hey, you guys want to be in my movie?” So thankfully, my friends work really cheap. It’s pizza and beer. Thankfully, because the budget for the movie was already expensive.
PEFF: Pizza is so expensive nowadays too. That’s so hard. I would love to hear more about the film festival happening in 2027.
Inanna: Sure – “Once a Porn a Time… in Paris”
Thanks to one of our kinky friends, we did a poll on FetLife to see if anyone had some good ideas. Thanks to a friend, she inspired that one. Paris’ first international short erotic film festival. We’ll be doing that on January 23rd, 2027. We’re taking submissions now and already have some wonderful community partners partnering up with us. That’s really exciting. I’m hoping to extend it to two days. That said, I want to be realistic. It’s our first year doing it. We organize a lot of other events. I know that the first time we do it is always a lot of work. I want to make sure that it’s a huge success. Maybe we’ll do a second day. We’ll do it on the 26th also, but definitely on the 27th of January. There will be an online festival so people will be able to access the film.
PEFF: That’s huge.
Inanna: Yeah, through PinkLabelTV. We’ve had our films on PinkLabel for several years. We love them. It’s a fabulous platform. It’s fantastic to work with. If anyone watching is looking for films to watch, go check out PinkLabel. They’re just a great group of folks and we appreciate their support. If you’re not in Paris, if you can’t make it to Paris in early 2027, it will be available online. Send us your porn! We want to see your porn!
PEFF: Careful. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s everywhere. My goodness.
Inanna: That website is onceapornatime.com Our films are on jinklabcreation.com I’m sure you’ll have all this. You can find me for speaking or giving workshops on my website.