Sundance Film Fest 2023–Sebastián Silva’s bold feature, Rotting in the Sun, is starring the popular social media personality Jordan Firstman.
The meta queer comedy stars Silva and Firstman as fictionalized versions of themselves. Silva is a suicidal director and Firstman is a social media influencer who is trying to get his first TV series off the ground.
Full-Frontal Male Nudity
The film includes many scenes of graphic sex acts and full-frontal male nudity. Silva confirmed that a lot of the sex in the film is real and unstimulated.
“Everybody watches porn,” Firstman said about included real sex in the film. “It’s this thing where it can’t be in a movie or a TV show when we’re literally watching more porn than we are movies. The way we do it, symbolically, to me what it says about gay culture is that it’s meaningless. If there’s a cock there, I’m going to suck it. That’s how my life goes and how a lot of gay men’s lives go. It’s just there.”
Silva tried to capture that kind of realism in the film. “I have cocks down, down, down my throat,” Firstman describes of his performance in the film. “My cock is in somebody’s throat. The guy who plays the cock I sucked has a beautiful cock. I originally wanted the biggest cock we could find. I wanted to be sucking a 12-inch. We did casting… Sebastian sent me the first round of casting and I said, ‘Absolutely not!’”
Americans Scared of Genitals
Silva added, “The sex is so graphic that it’s a double-edged sword. People, especially Americans, are so scared of genitals. I’m scared a little bit that a lot of people will center on the cocks and only talking about cocks when it’s just a trait of one of the characters.”
Rotting in the Sun marks Firstman’s biggest feature film role to date after making a name for himself as a social median comedian.
Silva is no stranger to making Sundance headlines as his debut The Maid won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema, while Crystal Fairy won Sundance’s Director Award: World Cinema Dramatic.
Silva is currently developing two TV series with Ari Aster and A24.
