At the 2025 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the Czech Republic’s largest film festival, Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys took a victory lap after securing the Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate in South by Southwest’s (SXSW) Narrative Feature Competition earlier this year. Sriram—who wrote, directed, and starred in the work—tells the story of AP, a sex worker in Trashtown, USA (a self-described, fictionalised “decrepit South”), who travels around with her best friend Danni (Sadie Scott) trying to collect the 1000 dollars she is told is necessary to lift a curse on herself. Shot in lush 16mm, we’re privy to this glorious world through Sriram’s eye, a carefully cultivated set of homages to works of cinema and slices of the US that are so rarely honoured in real life or onscreen.
At the festival, Purple Hour sat down to speak with Sriram after the film screened for the first time in the Afterhours late night strand, exploring the work’s categorisation at festivals and how the film is in boisterous defiance of what the everyday is meant to look like.
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Purple Hour: There seems to be this small but mighty renaissance in queer road movies. Did you have this idea in mind at all when you were creating the film?
Annapurna Sriram: I wrote this script eight years ago, to be fair. When I wrote it, there wasn’t the research—I was thinking, great, look at how long this took! I love After Hours. I love Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. I love Nights of Cabiria. Those were structurally the movies I was basing it off of: we meet this character, and then we meet this character. It was also written in a way where there were a lot of vignettes, scenes that I was recording from my life, where I thought, that was a really crazy situation I was just in. I should just write that down. A lot of the scenes were built, especially with all the clients, where I would just think, wow, no one would believe this really happened—it should be a scene. That was how I sort of saw my life. I have this ability to zoom out and look at my life and say, this is fucking crazy, this would be an insane movie. It’s like I’m disembodied. Because of that, there were so many of these vignettes, and then I was also seeing these psychics and having these experiences with the psychics, where I was like, what is happening?
Could you talk about the film’s very unique sound design, which gives us a bit of insight into AP’s brain?
My editor built a lot of the basis of the sound design in the edit—a light blueprint, I would say. When we brought on our sound designer, Nathan Ruyle, he got the movie. He understood it—it’s theatrical, it’s camp. It gets real. We have these moments where we can go Gonzo, but then we have these other moments where we can go atmospheric or diegetic. I was always really into certain scenes of saying, let’s have the sound be diegetic, but then it becomes score. The cartoons are in the background, but then it’s sort of scoring the scene. Or the music from the sitcom plays and the scene becomes kind of a sitcom. I was really into playing with form and constantly finding how we could amp up the humour or the setting and atmosphere. Nathan’s just such an artist, and I think he has a theatre background. I have a theatre background. I also feel that because we come from theatre, we’re more comfortable going a little bigger. We can make it a little heightened.
I adore that opening scene where AP visits the psychic in the swamp.
And [Big] Freedia is amazing. I felt like I didn’t know how to tie it all together other than doing this sort of road trip, journey into the night, the fool’s journey. My other scripts are not structured like that. It’s just this one.
Balls to the walls here.
It’s funny—everyone says, “Wow, it’s so bold, it’s so brave!” But to me, it really just feels very normal and very wholesome.
Just a chill day.
My producer asked, do [festivals] consider feminist queer cinema fantastical? There’s this thing where they say, “Oh, you’re fantastical.” And we’re like, this is feminist. This isn’t fantastical. Yes, we use some of the trappings of camp, or John Waters or Ken Russell, or that style—but the core of the movie and the messaging of the movie is very much about being a woman: capitalism and structures of oppression. It’s definitely not a horror movie.
It’s not at all a conventional genre film. There’s definitely a conversation around this happening on the festival circuit here in Europe, both in terms of why genre film is seen as “less-than” anf why queer films have to fit a specific mould in order to be considered for certain exhibition spaces.
In the States, we do get some of that, too. At SXSW, we were in competition, while in Europe, we’re in all these fantastic festivals. The audience is in the right, but there is this interesting thing of asking, does it need to be a naturalistic drama to consider it serious cinema?
Could you talk about your film being programmed differently at different festivals?
A lot of horror festivals like to reach out, but we’re trying to angle towards queer festivals, female-centred festivals—also prestige, and Karlovy Vary has the prestige. I watched the beginning [of the screening] last night because I usually like to just hear it. To me, [the film] felt very American. I was like, I don’t know if everything’s gonna make sense to this audience. But this is a different perspective on the USA, because it’s very female, it’s women of colour. It’s sort of “outsider”. It’s the South—it’s the decrepit South. It’s not like Yellowstone or something. This is more the reality of America. We want to do outreach and make sure we’re somehow trying to connect with either the trans community or some sort of LGBTQ nonprofit to make sure we can get our people and our audience into the theatre, and not just horror boys and film nerds. I don’t know—there’s a lot of sexism. I’m always like, I don’t really need all of these men to proceed.
