‘Why shouldn’t someone with a good upbringing choose sex work?’ Mikko Mäkelä on his new drama film

The face of queer cinema has changed since A Moment In The Reeds, the feature directorial debut from Finnish-British filmmaker Mikko Mäkelä.

The film traces the love affair between Finnish student Leevi and Syrian asylum seeker Tareq, as both spend a summer renovating Leevi’s father’s home. It arrived in 2017, the same year that Josh O’Connor’s bucolic drama God’s Own Country edged the British mainstream; both films were compared to Brokeback Mountain, from 12 years earlier, which speaks volumes about the scarcity of major queer films even just eight years ago.

“I think queer cinema has, kind of, been thriving, generally,” says 36-year-old Mäkelä, slowly and unconvincingly. We’re chatting over Zoom about his recently-released film Sebastian, he in London where he moved to from Finland as a teen, by way of a few years at Loughborough University.

In the past few years alone, queer cinema has seen some pretty big swings, from queer cheese-fests (Red, White & Royal Blue) to lesbian bodybuilding crime thrillers (Love Lies Bleeding) and more gay Westerns (Strange Way of Life). As these and countless others have made waves, the commercial appeal of queer cinema has swelled.

Mäkelä applauds the huge range of stories now being told, yet he’s cautious. “I think maybe what has fallen by the wayside a bit and needs to maybe be reinvigorated is also that lower budget, slightly more radical queer filmmaking as well,” he wonders. As major film conglomerates take a shine to queer stories, Mäkelä worries about sanitisation. “There’s still often a little bit of compromise maybe on the radicalness of the view, and I think we mustn’t forget about that ‘no permissions asked’ type of radical queer cinema.”

It’s apt to be touching on the limitations placed on storytellers and the push-pull of commercial viability versus authenticity, as both are layers in the onion that is Mäkelä’s new queer film Sebastian. It follows mid-twenties literary journalist Max (Ruaridh Mollica in a BIFA-nominated performance), who engages in sex work on the side under the pseudonym Sebastian. At first, it’s for research for his debut novel about a sex worker of the same moniker. Later, he realises it liberates him.

As Max forges unexpected connections with the men he meets, his novel reflects as much, much to the discontentment of his publisher Dionne (Line of Duty’s Leanne Best) who is keen on something more sordid. It leaves him with a dilemna: should he publish fiction that is compromised, or memoir that is fetishised or judged?

Sebastian is a string of meta questions and scrupules. Is an artist’s authenticity paramount, or should they be free to keep their art and lives separate? Max’s mother fears her son is giving too much of himself away in his work; his best friend thinks his reality is his USP. Who has ownership of a story? His boss insists queer authors should be covered by queer journalists; Max seems to quietly struggle with the morality of telling a sex work tale. 

It ironically begs the question of why Mäkelä himself wanted to tell this story. Yes, he was curious about the boundaries placed on authors, filmmakers and their ilk, but the question of why people engage in sex work was more interesting. “It was really about wanting to interrogate the idea that sex work is somehow a lesser choice in a sense,” he explains.

After moving to London, he realised that a number of his peers were engaging in sex work through choice, rather than necessity. In Sebastian, “it was really important to avoid some of these tropes and correct some of the cliched thinking around sex work, like thinking of sex workers as victims in the first place, or that the work couldn’t be empowering as well.” Historically, queer and trans sex workers in film are forced into the role via some identity-based trauma, often with perilous consequences. “Why shouldn’t someone with a fairly good upbringing or background… choose to go into sex work as well?”

Sebastian also interrogates the people who hire sex workers. Other films have painted clients as “aggressive or gross or pathetic”, while Mäkelä wanted to open the door to a broad pool of clients, of differing age groups, professions, attitudes. “Everyone has their own reasons for hiring a sex worker,” he says, and he was focused on “approaching them with as much humanity and trying to understand their perspective”. For the most part, the clients don’t treat Max like a service provider. As a result, he takes something from the experience, be it pleasure, connection, or self-discovery.

For all of Mäkelä’s hesitations about the purity of recent queer cinema, gay sex on screen is irrefutably more common that it once was. Last year opened with Paul Mescal licking sperm from Andrew Scott’s chest in ghostly gay romance All of Us Strangers, and closed with Daniel Craig shafting Drew Starkey in hallucinogenic period drama Queer. In Sebastian, the sex scenes are frequent and fairly explicit, with Mäkelä taking care to craft each one intricately. 

“They are so important for the story, the character development, that I could never have just written ‘Max and Nick (a client Max forms a bond with, played by Jonathan Hyde) have sex’, or something like that.” Every movement was detailed to flesh out the characters and aid the actors, some of whom were engaging in their first ever sex scenes. “In the first conversations with all of the actors, I always wanted to just impress upon people that this would be a very sex-positive film,” he says. “It’s not the sort of film for every actor.”

The importance of sex positivity extended to the film’s intimacy coordinators too. “It was my first time working with one because on the first film that I did, it was actually before that position had even been created,” he says. Rufai Ajala joined while filming, and was “key” to shaping the actors’ positive experience.

“It was important for this film that we had a queer intimacy coordinator who understood the mechanics of queer sex,” he says. Not all in the role are that sex positive, he shares. “I think maybe some might have the reputation for being more questioning of the necessity of sex scenes and that wouldn’t be someone who we were looking to work with on this film.”

So queer cinema is evolving, as will Mäkelä. “I definitely will continue making queer films forever I’m sure,” he promises. “Not exclusively, but I think in those stories that might not be explicitly queer, there’ll be something else about the characters that appeals to me, through them being an outsider.” Perhaps it’s Mäkelä who will evolve, and queer cinema will follow in his tracks.

Sebastian is out in UK cinemas now.

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