A LWAY S

H E R E

Germany 2015, 11 min, color, Digital Video (webcam), QT-File/Blu-Ray, 24fps, 1:1,85, stereo
Rumanian/Russian, subtitles available in English, German
Film by Steffen Khn
Translation Irina Breitenstein, Ilinca Florian, Maija Pitschugin
Thank you Lauro Cress, Leonardo Franke, Vrna Paravel, David Schmitt, Lucien Taylor

Always Here is a post-cinematic

documentary about adult webcam
performers. While doing research
for another project, I stumbled
upon different websites, where
users can pay for private erotic
performances by men, women,
but also couples. Most of these
websites models come from
Eastern Europe, particularly from
Romania and the Ukraine. Many of
them work in large sexcam studios
with dozens of cabins, while an
increasing number of them also
offer their services from within
their private homes.
During much of their work
time, the performers sit in front
of the camera and try to attract
visitors to pay for a private oneon-one session. Yet as they often
work in shifts of eight to ten hours

(and thus spend a good deal of

their lives publicly in front of the
webcam) the mundaneness and
banality of the everyday inevitably
disrupts their performance
at times. Fascinated by these
glimpses of real quotidian life,
I spent hours and hours as a
voyeur on the website. I witnessed
moments of boredom, everyday
conflicts between couples, but also
moments of closeness and true
affection.
The film I edited out of
this material engages with the
aesthetics of the observational
cinema tradition of documentary
filmmaking. In this case, however,
the observer is literally absent
from the scene as everything
unfolds without the presence of a
director or camera person.

Yet those fleeting moments of

intimacy between my protagonists
all occur in their acute awareness
of being watched by strangers.
Even though this film is not
crafted through the conventional
means of cinema (it is shot with
nothing but a screen capture
software), I am convinced that it
must be shown on the big screen.
I am interested in the tensions
between the private and the public,
between voyeurism and empathy
that inevitably arise when images
meant for singular consumption on
a laptop screen become re-framed
for the experience of collective
spectatorship within the dispositif
of cinema.
Contact: steffenkoehn@gmail.com

Always
Here

A Film by Steffen Khn