What is a body? One can’t help but wonder about the dimensions of the human body; what it can handle. How hard it is to exist with that meat suit without getting judged or attacked just for the ownership of it. In his bold and very provocative documentary A Body To Live In, director Angelo Madsen shares the portrait of a controversial man, BDSM performance art icon Fakir Musafar, through his own words.
BDSM culture is still taboo to this day and age, even as fetish is becoming more normalized and mainstream through some recent flicks like Babygirl and the upcoming Pillion, it is still as far from popular culture as one would expect. With this documentary, the provocateur and provocatee become one—us—while watching the world of Musafar unravel before our eyes, caught between awe and disbelief. Musafar’s voice, recorded pre-mortem by Patrick McCullay, another BDSM artist, extends throughout the film to expose viewers to his intricate and fearless nature world.
Through Musafar, concepts like gender fluidity, nonconformity, body experimentation, and modification take on a whole new meaning. The body becomes more than a concept or a physical existence. It’s something that could be bent, molded, given, or taken. Musafar bravely uses his body as the tapestry required to create the art piece, and through Madsen’s careful collage of archival material showcasing the man himself in all his performance glory, the documentary becomes a body breathing life with its content, heartaches, and fragility.
Through becoming his own voyeur, Musafar, in his phantom presence, invites viewers to spy on him, but it’s a mutually voyeuristic bargain between voyeur and the subject of voyeurism, the kind that would make French film directors proud. The archival still life tableaus are liberating, provocative, sexy, and unimaginable. They are not simply an expression of pain tolerance as normally seen through BDSM culture, but more of a catalogue of seeking intimacy and arousal through self-bondage under the extremity of pain-seeking-pleasure. It elevates an excruciating art form into a beautiful, hypersensitive vehicle for Musafar’s philosophy and his erotic-mystical beliefs. Instead of soul searchers a la Paulo Coelho style, Fakir Musafar is more of a body explorer, a searcher into the art of consenting sadism and masochism.
Instead of an exploitative show of bodies in extremity gear and sexual positions, Musafar’s photos are more of a display of extraordinary people whose treatment of their bodies veers into the kinky and the extreme. Madsen’s documentary also highlights other individuals in his subject’s life: his wife, friends, and some of his subjects. It pulls no punches in showing people’s reactions to Musafar’s extreme experiments, and their out-of-the-box reactions to having their body handled in a way that is mindblowing to the inexperienced viewer’s mind.
Madsen also plays with the minimal, synthetic, stringy sound of the score. He creates an image that provokes but also creates a wave of multiples; the still-life tableaus take on a life of their own that is by no means “still” or stagnant. It defies categorization as much as his central figure, the main subject of this mesmerizing and thought-provoking documentary.
A Body To Live In startles but doesn’t plunge its way through the consciousness with a morbid exposure to hardcore material that forces the viewer to cringe. It’s a sensitive portrayal of a tough subject matter to swallow. But it’s art, and it’s beautiful to immerse in while admiring the bravery and courageous existence of Musafar, whose trials and errors with his body create a masterclass in bodily liberty and self-expression.
A Body To Live In held its West Coast Premiere as a part of the Documentary Features section of the 2025 Frameline Festival.
Director: Angelo Madsen
Rated: NR
Runtime: 98m
A Body To Live In startles but doesn’t plunge its way through the consciousness with a morbid exposure to hardcore material that forces the viewer to cringe. It’s a sensitive portrayal of a tough subject matter to swallow. But it’s art, and it’s beautiful to immerse in while admiring the bravery and courageous existence of Musafar, whose trials and errors with his body create a masterclass in bodily liberty and self-expression.
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GVN Rating
Jaylan Salah Salman is an Egyptian poet, translator, and film critic for InSession Film, Geek Vibes Nation, and Moviejawn. She has published two poetry collections and translated fourteen books for International Languages House publishing company. She began her first web series on YouTube, “The JayDays,” where she comments on films and other daily life antics. On her free days, she searches for recipes to cook while reviewing movies.
