Founding Story
In 2016, Grace Van Ness and Christopher Holloway worked in post-production at Kink.com, housed in the San Francisco Armory—a gothic castle in the Mission District. The Armory buzzed with the energy of sex workers, performers, and creatives who toiled in the catacombs of the castle, making smut for the internet to consume. But beneath that creative ferment, our world was shifting beneath our feet.
The adult industry was in upheaval. Big production companies were folding or downsizing as independent creators flocked to emerging platforms like OnlyFans. In the Armory's editing bays and dungeons, conversations grew heavy with uncertainty. Performers who'd built careers around traditional shoots suddenly faced an entirely new landscape. Some thrived in the transition; others watched their livelihoods crumble. The community that had felt so solid was fracturing, leaving many of us grappling with heartbreak, estrangement, and a professional identity crisis.
It was against this backdrop of uncertainty that Failed Films was born. Initially, we called it "Stupid Broken Fucking Failures"—a name that captured the raw emotional wreckage our community was experiencing. We felt like we had nothing left to lose, so we decided: "Fuck it." Let's put our failures, pain, and dreams on screen. Let's create a space where risking failure wasn't just accepted but celebrated. Here was a place to showcase the work that wasn't for sale, the art that emerged from our most vulnerable moments.
Over the past eight years, Failed Films has become our most successful failure. With the addition of Antone Martinez and Lauren West, Failed Films has run for seven seasons and has featured hundreds of artists from all over the world. The festival has evolved into something larger than any of us imagined. It remains a gathering place where sex worker, queer, and misfit communities come together to bear witness to each other's art.
But Failed Films has grown beyond a film festival—it's become a permission structure to risk failure. It's a container that holds all the lube, glitter, and cum spilled for your art, a space where the messiness of creation is not just tolerated but celebrated as essential to the creative process.
Christopher Holloway
Christopher Holloway is an Oakland-based content creator with over a decade of experience producing things for the internet. He was the founding producer for The Whorecast, a podcast that chronicled the stories, art, and voices of American sex workers. He cut his production teeth on the stone walls of the SF amory for Kink.com. It was in that castle that Failed Films was birthed. Whether you find him peddling smut or a SFW production, Christopher brings a vision, steadiness, and problem-solving that makes him invaluable to any production. He is truly a keystone to the failed film experiment.
antone
is under construction.
Lauren West
is a multidisciplinary artist focused on collage, film & fashion. She has proudly produced and curated the current and previous three iterations of Failed Films in Los Angeles. Her first self directed film, The Empress, debuted at Failed Films 2019 & was featured at the 2021 San Francisco Porn Film Festival. Her film ἌΦΕΣΙΝ followed suit in 2022. Lauren has also performed in the Antone directed film Collage Daydream inspired by Lauren’s collage work. This work, which largely centers vintage Playboy models as subjects alludes to themes of feminism & sexuality. In this regard, Lauren has worked with publications such as Playboy & the Los Angeles Times. Her ongoing goal is to fuse art and sexuality.
Spike
Spike is a queer, latinx, multi-medium artist and performer. An native of Southern California, Spike is involved with live-event hosting, drag performance, and with the leather and fetish community in and around the Los Angeles area. In both life and art, Spike explores and blends traditional dichotomies of light and dark, masculine and feminine, rage and joy. His raw, unconventional, yet inviting work reflects his view that expression is existence. No Fears. No Regrets. Just Life.