After a six-month hiatus, queer indie porn studio AORTA films is back with a relaunched website, new monthly short film releases, updated branding, and a slew of new programming, including festivals, guest artists, workshops, and commercial collaborations. AORTA paused operations after two of its three founding members—Parts Authority and Ginny Woolf—left the company. But the third co-founder, Mahx Capacity, has relaunched the company as its creative director.

In a press release about the relaunch, Capacity said that, since the founding of AORTA in 2015, “Finding an audience that was hungry for inventive queer porn allowed us to expand and explore our vision. We couldn’t be more thrilled to enter into AORTA’s future with an ambitious set of new programs and a packed lineup of hot new films. We sincerely hope that our films and programming can offer viewers some distraction and joy during difficult times, and continue to celebrate the queer capacity for embodied, radical pleasure.”

AORTA films’ work centers performers across a wide range of bodies and identities and works to incorporate experimental performance art and BDSM community values into its work. With work presented at festivals, galleries, and museums around the world, the studio has earned awards from the Hacker Porn Film Festival in Rome and the Vienna Porn Festival. 

Sporting an updated logo that celebrates queer sex through the act of fisting, the updated website for the award-winning indie studio promises “lusty, opulent, glorious, fuckery.” A roster of upcoming films includes  bad-babysitter roleplay in “Teen Angels,” a masc4masc wrestling scene “Fucking Loser,” the femme fisting and squirting scene “Rough Lust,” surreal fantasy in “Portal,” and a campfire orgy in “Kindling,” among others.

AORTA is planning its first watch-from home film festival—BEDDED—in June 2020. The festival will include three curated short films from international creators, which will be announced next month. “Designed to share the incredible wealth and variety of all the independent queer porn being created right now, BEDDED offers a curated selection of films twice a year that AORTA thinks can’t be missed,” Mahx Capacity said in a press release.

Another upcoming program, AORTA Induction, will invite “brilliant thinkers, makers, and doers” from fields adjacent to erotic entertainment. “Welcomed as honored guest collaborators, Inductees are asked to bring their unique and compelling understandings of sex, pleasure, identity, and embodiment to the creation of a new short film.” The first Inductee will bee announced later this year.

Meanwhile, AORTA_ITF (short for “In The Flesh”), an ongoing series of workshops, screenings, talks, and other events, aims to “pull queer porn out of the digital ether and get it back in viewers’ bodies.”

AORTA films is also premiering a new commercial endeavor called AORTAx as part of the studio’s relaunch. Offering work-for-hire collaborations with sex- and sexuality-focused projects, AORTAx aims to create erotic content for films, brands, music videos, commercials, and more. AORTAx’s first project—due to launch in June—will be a music video for LA industrial band CONTRACULT Collective’s upcoming single, “Hogtied.”