18/03/2024 - Patricia Franquesa’s sophomore feature looks inward at the filmmaker’s own story as a victim of sexual extortion and her quest to reclaim agency of her narrative

“Sextortion is the most prevalent form of Intimate Image Abuse that the Revenge Porn Helpline has seen in 2022”, reads the beginning of Patricia Franquesa’s My Sextortion Diary, which enjoyed its world premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition of SXSW. In a subversive spin on the contemporary obsession with true crime media and documentaries on the dark side of human nature, the Spanish filmmaker retakes control of her own story as a victim of sexual blackmail. Using a personal rather than investigative approach, she also adopts all major roles as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and producer. With the strength of its setup and attempts at intriguing rather than sensationalising, the film’s lack of substantive visual material makes up for it in bite over its brief 64-minute runtime.

Franquesa — known in the film by her nickname Pati — arrives in Madrid, where her ex invites her for a lunch meetup, only for her laptop to be stolen at the bar. She soon receives an email notifying her that her laptop has been hacked, and that her nude photos are being used as blackmail against her unless she pays 2,400 USD by the hacker’s deadline. Realising that she is the victim of a classic sextortion scheme and with the police being of no help, Pati must make decisions on how to proceed as the hacker gets more aggressive. The film’s primary meta element is that Pati also begins work on a documentary about her ongoing sextortion case under the equally evocative working title “Digital Vagina” — which ends up as My Sextortion Diary.

Franquesa’s newest film is a bold and highly personal work of self-archiving, appearing in form as an autoethnographic collage. The multi-hyphenate works backwards to reconstruct events predominantly through preexisting phone footage taken in her day-to-day life. These include reconstructed chats between Pati and her friends as well as text-to-speech sequences of blackmail emails translated from Spanish and read out in English, with sound design by Laia Casanovas.

As the police fail to assist in stopping the hacker (and in one instance, an officer goes as far as harassing Pati by asking her to take nude photos of him and his wife), Pati reclaims agency of her narrative. However, there are hardly any active clips of Pati other than screen-captured video where she conducts cursory Internet searches, with few hands-on acts of documentation in the moment. A black screen acts as the basis of the film frame where vertical phone videos and still photos are superimposed on top. While this is an inventive demonstration of form, the bulk of the film is composed of voiceover on top of what could be read simply as b-roll. Regrettably, this choice dampens much of the story’s affective power on the suppression of female sexuality, leaving the viewer within the confines of the digital space, even when the effects are more far-reaching.

At the start of the film, Franquesa calls attention to the alarming frequency of sextortion cases, the exact number of which cannot be told given underreporting. Her mission, in part, is to shed light on this phenomenon, which can be an extremely frightening and shameful experience for victims. In this objective, Franquesa triumphs in reappropriating her narrative, even embedding censored versions of her own intimate photos within the film in a Foucauldian rejection of social discipline of the body.

My Sextortion Diary is a production by Spain’s Gadea Films, with the UK’s Taskovski Films handling international sales.