This is a preview piece ahead of the Music Box Theatre screening of “Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency” on Tuesday, September 29; the full feature interview will follow closer to the film’s streaming release, date TBA.
Ahead of a Chicago stop at the Music Box Theatre, the ecosex art pioneers talk about surviving wildfire, marrying the Earth, and why a 35-year-old peacock steals their new documentary.
In August 2020, lightning cracked open the Santa Cruz Mountains and set them on fire. By the time the CZU Lightning Complex fires burned out, nearly 1,500 homes were gone, one person was dead, and Big Basin Redwood State Park — California’s oldest — lay in ruins. The blaze came within a block of the Boulder Creek home belonging to artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, who evacuated with their dog Butch and barely enough time to grab what mattered.
Five years later, that day inspired “Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency,” the closing chapter of a trilogy the couple has been building for nearly two decades.
Synopsis
“Playing with Fire” is a heartfelt, mythopoetic documentary born from the ashes of a massive, devastating forest fire. Long-time lovers Beth and Annie are forced to evacuate their home with their dog Butch, and their lives are forever transformed. The film unfolds through an ecosexual lens — imagining the Earth as a lover — while weaving in stories from a formerly incarcerated firefighter, Indigenous scholars, fire artists, a witch therapist, a fire fetishist, a fire tassel-twirling burlesque dancer, and Albert the wild, white peacock. Beth and Annie blend loss and grief with art, humor, sensuality and community care, exploring how a climate catastrophe intersects with social justice to create a portrait of resilience in a world in flames.
“Playing with Fire” is the third film in the pair’s environmental documentary trilogy, following “Goodbye Gauley Mountain — An Ecosexual Love Story” and “Water Makes Us Wet — An Ecosexual Adventure.”
From mother to lover
Sprinkle and Stephens are the artists behind “ecosexuality,” a movement they say they launched with a manifesto and years of performance art built on a simple reframe: instead of treating the Earth as a mother to be protected, treat it as a lover to be pleasured. The idea can be platonic or explicitly erotic, but the throughline is reciprocity — giving the planet pleasure, not just extracting from it.
It’s a concept they’ve staged literally. In 2008, during the fight over marriage equality, the couple “married the Earth” in a free public performance — Fluxus-inspired happenings where audience members become brides, officiants, and objecting in-laws on the spot. They’ve since married the moon, the sky, and, most recently, fire itself, in Croatia. Berlin is next.
Reclaiming fire
Much of “Playing with Fire” is about refusing to treat fire as an enemy. Stephens, a former ceramicist with a blacksmith grandfather, has loved flame her whole life; Sprinkle points to the film’s exploration of how colonial fear of fire — tangled up with the demonization of fire as hellish — fed both wildfire mismanagement and the suppression of Indigenous burning practices. Scholar Melissa Nelson appears in the film to trace that history.
“You can’t kill fire,” is the thesis, more or less. You can only learn to live inside its cycle of destruction and regrowth — a metaphor the directors extend to social upheaval as readily as to forest ecology.
Enter Albert
If the film has a breakout star, it’s not human. Albert was a white peacock who’d wandered the couple’s Boulder Creek neighborhood for 35 years, a local legend residents worried about more than their own houses when the fire came. He narrates the film — and, in a stroke the directors call almost eerie, the editor who gave the film its final cut had, a decade earlier and by total coincidence, edited an Animal Planet segment about the very same peacock.
Twenty years, three films
Together, the trilogy doubles as an accidental autobiography, tracking a partnership now closing in on twenty years — one that survived a health scare that delayed this film’s release. Sprinkle’s recent breast cancer diagnosis was treated as its own kind of art project by the couple, who describe the human body as an ecosystem no less than the forest is. In the meantime, they channeled the experience into Bazoombas in Love, a boob-themed visual art show covered in Artforum.
What they want from you
Neither Sprinkle nor Stephens claims to have a tidy answer for wildfire, climate collapse, or wealth inequality — Stephens is blunt that she thinks the economic system itself needs to go. But their prescription for the moment is less about policy than posture: choose love over fear where you can, take care of your neighbors, and don’t let despair cancel out pleasure.
“We are pleasure activists,” Sprinkle says — and she means it as a genuine strategy, not a slogan, for staying functional inside a genuine emergency.
Screening details: Music Box Theatre, Tuesday, September 29, 6:30 PM
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle will give a pre-film “Ecosex 101” primer, followed by a post-film Q&A moderated by Cinema Femme contributor Matt Fagerholm. Gerber/Hart will table in the lobby before and after the screening with a pop-up of queer archival materials from their collections.
“Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency” premiered at Frameline in June 2025. The tour continues through New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with the full trilogy screening in Santa Cruz and Chicago.
