Interview with FUCKTOYS director Annapurna Sriram

Ahead of LA’s Femme Filth Fest 2026, film journalist Daniela Urzola sat down with Annapurna Sriram, the director of the festival’s headlining feature, Fucktoys (2025). Much like this dreamromp of a movie, their expansive conversation below gets into everything from play, camp, and sex pop leading ladies to gender-based violence, liberation, and the future of queer cinema.

Tickets for the January 9 screening of Fucktoys have promptly sold out… But the event kicks off a killer weekend lineup to keep you taboo-ing for days. LA folks, take note:

Filth-Maker Networking
Where: The Marilyn Monroe Theater
When: Saturday, January 10, 2026; 5 - 7 PM

Shorts Block 1: F*CK!!!
Where: The Marilyn Monroe Theater
When: Saturday, January 10, 2026; 7 PM

Shorts Block 2: WTF?! (What the Filth?!)
Where: The Marilyn Monroe Theater
When: Sunday, January 11, 2026; 4:30 - 7 PM

Sugar Rot (with Writer/Director Becca Kozak!)
Where: The Marilyn Monroe Theater
When: Sunday, January 11, 2026; 7 - 11 PM

Now to whet your appetite till then…

Daniela Urzola (DU): I want to start by asking you about the playful tone of the film, beginning with the title. What is Fucktoys?

Annapurna Sriram (AS): When it comes to the tone of the movie, men struggle the most because it starts off really fun. It’s campy, silly, irreverent… It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And then the film shifts tonally. Over the course of the film, I wanted it to slowly become more grounded and more realistic, so that it creeps up on you. My hope was that by the end, the viewer suddenly understands: Wait, now we’re in this serious drama. And in a lot of ways, the tonal shift of the movie represents what being a woman is like. It’s as though the movie itself is a woman, where we’re having to mask, we’re having to perform, we’re having to be the fun party girl, the girl who’s down for anything, the girl who lets all these weird things happen. And slowly we get more into the grounded realities of that experience—when you’re in situations where you realize you’re not safe or you’re more vulnerable to violence because of the patriarchy. That’s funny to me because sometimes when men watch the film, they love the initial tone and then they don’t like where it goes. And it’s kind of like, isn’t that what it’s like to be a woman? You like when we’re all fun and sexy, but you don’t like when we have to get real with you.

DU: You depict a type of violence to women, non-binary people, and sex workers. This is a reality that is being progressively normalized in cinema, but it’s very recent. Tell me about this decision to make AP, the main character, a sex worker.