Okay this might seem obvious but this film is not really about competitive endurance tickling.

I missed this film when it was at the Melbourne Film Festival quite a few years ago and remember there being a nice buzz about it. Arriving in Melbourne at 6:15 on a Friday night, I saw that there was a session starting in 15 minutes with director David Ferrier conducting a Q&A. I couldn’t resist.

On the surface this seems to be about New Zealand journalist Ferrier making a documentary about a company, Jane O’Brien Media, that hosts competitive endurance tickling events in the USA. It’s an amusing concept, and probably something that not many people will have thought about.

It’s a niche fetish, although this American company definitely positions it as something more mainstream. It is only strapping young men who compete, enticed by promises of airfares and money if they will participate. They wear Adidas outfits and consent to being strapped down and tickled or being the ticklers, sometimes with four or five men straddling a bound participant.

It is all caught on video and immediately piques the interest of Ferrier, who has covered the gambit of weird and public interest stories in New Zealand. What he’s not prepared for is the sudden onslaught of threats and derogatory emails that he receives from Jane O’Brien Media. She/they seem to take offence at Ferrier’s sexuality, and his lighthearted investigation of this ‘sport.’

It is of course, more and so much less than it seems. The real story is who is behind this litigious onslaught and Ferrier, in his endearingly shambolic style which seems so antipodean, amazingly manages to pull apart the story and reveal who is behind the curtain.

Perhaps instigated by a personal sexual fetish, what it ends up being is a way to exploit young men, and also the prevalent homophobia that portrays being tickled as anything but a natural human response, framing it as something essentially non-heterosexual and non-masculine, which says a lot about how narrow the interpretation of masculinity can be.

Ferrier in the Q&A afterwards seemed apologetic about how he could have been more forceful, particularly when he confronts the perpetrators, but I felt this was part of the charm of the film. it seemed very Kiwi to be threatened by a powerful nation and to respond as a scrappy underdog unwilling to let it go.

I won’t give you any details other than to say that the person who is eventually unearthed as the perpetrator actually attended a screening of this film at a festival in LA and participated in the Q&A – you can see it here but spoiler warning if you haven’t seen the documentary first – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K88xF9mOUjc. I think it is fair to say that he never really understood or paid for the damage he did.