Alternately instructive, distressing, contestable and fascinating, Juliet Bashore’s quasi-documentary Kamikaze Hearts (1986) plunges into the adult entertainment industry of the 1980s and takes an unsparing look at misogyny, drug abuse and exploitation via the story of two women – naive newcomer Tigr and her partner, the magnetic, imperious adult entertainment veteran Sharon Mitchell – caught in a toxic romance.

Newly restored by Kino Lorber and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the film was screened at the BFI London Film Festival 2022 and now comes to BFI Blu-ray with extras including an audio commentary and a selection of newly recorded interviews.

By turns mesmerising and unsettling, Kamikaze Hearts is both a fascinating record of pre-gentrification San Francisco’s X-rated underground and an intense, searing love story that offers a disturbing glimpse of the commodification of bodies, feelings and lives.

Kamikaze Hearts will be released on UK Blu-ray by the BFI on 27 March 2023 at the RRP £19.99.

BLU-RAY FEATURES:

• Restored in 2K from the original camera negative by Kino Lorber and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
• Audio commentary by director Juliet Bashore, actors Sharon Mitchell, Jon Martin and Howie Gordon (aka Richard Pacheco), and performance artist Shelly Mars
• Crash (excerpt, 1994, 12 mins): Juliet Bashore workshopped a ‘fictional’ version of Kamikaze Hearts through the American Film Institute. This sketch is one of the outcomes of the AFI project
• Interviews (2022, 173 mins): a selection of newly recorded interviews totalling almost three hours, with Juliet Bashore, Sharon Mitchell, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, plus Susie Bright, Howie Gordon and Jon Martin
• Vintage trailer
• 2022 trailer
• *First pressing only* illustrated booklet with a new Director’s Statement by Juliet Bashore, new writing by artist, curator and co-founder of Club des Femmes Sarah Wood and extracts from a 1990 interview with Juliet Bashore; credits and notes on the special features