Marcel Winatschek

The Naked Director

Netflix made a whole series about Tatsumi Kumashiro building the Japanese adult film industry in the 1980s, which is kind of absurd and great. The Naked Director treats it all seriously—not as shock value, just as the business and ambition of building something in an industry most people pretend doesn’t exist. The Japanese porn world had its own weird aesthetic completely separate from the West, and the show actually cares about that history. What gets me is that it exists on Netflix now, mainstream, where you might find it between your other shows. That’s almost defiant.