Gregg Araki’s new film, I Want Your Sex, arrives this week as the director’s 12th feature and the most widely distributed release of his career. Speaking by video call from his Los Angeles home, Araki described the film as a study of desire, power and art that traverses sexual identities. “For me, it is a very queer story,” he said, framing the work as a take on kink and alternate sexuality that moves across the straight–queer spectrum.
I Want Your Sex features scenes that include bondage and explicit nudity and uses provocative visual motifs to interrogate sexual norms. Araki’s approach mixes elements of dark humour and formal provocation, a signature of his work since the early days of the new queer cinema movement. The film’s cast has been described as among the director’s most prominent in years, a development that accompanies its substantial theatrical rollout.
The film opens on roughly 700 US screens, a figure notable for an independent production and larger than the initial releases of recent films by veterans such as Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch. Industry observers cite the scope of the release as an indicator of broader commercial interest in director-driven material that engages with gender and sexuality. Araki, who has worked both inside and outside mainstream channels, is poised to reach a wider audience with this distribution.
Gregg Araki first attracted attention with work from the 1990s, including the 1995 road movie The Doom Generation, and is widely acknowledged as a formative figure in queer filmmaking. Forty years into his career, he continues to foreground themes of sexual identity and cultural constraint. The new film’s theatrical presence and explicit content are positioned to prompt discussion about representation, censorship and the place of provocative narratives in contemporary cinema.
