Since 2005, Dan Savage’s HUMP! short film festival has been a vanguard of progressive erotica, describing itself as “The best dirty little film festival in the world.” I can’t say I disagree with that notion, even as a writer who’s somewhat deficient in my hardcore pornographic knowledge.
HUMP’s full 2026 lineup comes in at just under an hour and a half, and in keeping with the rules of the festival, each short runs a maximum of five minutes, maintaining a really quick pace and making it so that you never really get bored with what’s on the screen.
Standouts for me included In The Flame: Sir Leo, which features legitimately beautiful cinematography involving BDSM fire play, the stop motion horror/comedy Frankenpeen and the opening short Foot Cum (a bunch of shots of feet and penises and people saying the words “foot cum” to a musical background).
I found that the true value of these shorts was in how they succeeded in removing any notion of shame from their subject matter. When you hear someone proudly talk about what draws them to the things they’re sexually interested in on film, it validates that desire for those who might also hold it. Implementing comedy and music into sex, which me and my Gen Z contemporaries seem to view with the utmost seriousness, reminds us just how unavoidably silly and awkward humans are as sexual beings.
As I watched the films, I wished more and more that a greater amount of artistically focused shorts like Foot Cum or Frankenpeen were included. Many of these films are just two people having sex somewhere with very little differentiating them from an OnlyFans clip or PornHub video. Films like Persephone’s Return (a take on the Hades/Persephone myth), Puritan Pastures (a farm scene using silent film techniques) and Backseat manage to avoid this by at least utilizing interesting filmmaking techniques, well shot scenes and transitions that move them along like an actual short film.
I was particularly unimpressed by Snow Plow which is literally just a single five minute IPhone shot of two snowboarders banging on the side of a run on Mount Hood. If there was snowboard footage, alternate angles or any kind of story, I could defend its inclusion, but two white Portlanders fucking on a mountain is not a subject I find particularly compelling.
Similarly, A Dry Heat is just two guys sucking and stroking one another on the top of a big hill. Totally awesome — dudes rock — but not particularly moving filmmaking, even for a porno.
On the contrary, some of the films contained themes that were just too hard for me to parse. In Over Easy, some individual jacks off onto a hot pan, cooks some eggs on top of the semen, then puts the delightful breakfast on avocado toast and eats it. I couldn’t figure out if the short was commenting on U.S. foreign policy, Freemasonry or the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but the layers of symbolism contained within it were clearly endless. It’s times like these I wish I could dig up Roger Ebert.
Overall, I expect the live audience reception to the 2026 HUMP! lineup to be very positive. It’s fun, emotionally evocative at times, and almost always visually interesting. I think the overall quality of the festival could be improved with a tighter criteria for their film selection, but as a (w)hole, I found the lineup pretty compelling, even if it wasn’t really my thing.
HUMP! screens Thursday, Oct. 9 through Saturday, Oct. 10 at Art House, 492 East 13th Avenue. Hosted by drag king Heavy Cream. Tickets are $20 and are available at HumpFilmFest.com. The festival is 18-plus.