Cinekink co-founder and director Lisa Vandever emailed a short note with the press release announcing the film festival’s 2005 awards, which were handed out last week at the conclusion of the fest’s week-long run at the Anthology Film Archives. Last year, blogging the awards, I made a bit of fun out of Cinekink’s p.r. bannering of a special tribute award to At Home at the End of the World while the more provocative titles were chronicled well out of the lede. So this year, Vandever, who is profiled here in the New York Press by J.R. Taylor, makes note that this year’s release is focused more clearly on Cinekink’s winners but explains why the festival still retains “some tip of the hat to Hollywood.” She writes, “Figure we need some kind of notice of how they’re representing kink — and if we didn’t reward the positive with an award, we’d just be standing up there every year bitching about Law and Order!

In Taylor’s piece, Vandever elaborates, explaining that the festival is trying to carve out a niche devoted to provocative s/m and fetish-themed that can’t properly be classified as porn. She says that the festival moved away this year from audience screenings of fetish videos to more developed features: “It’s a different experience to watch a fetish video on the big screen for 80 minutes straight. Now we’ve gone back to narrative films — hopefully ones that we can help get noticed by programmers in other festivals…. We don’t have a category for Best Porn,” explains Vandever, “because most porn doesn’t have a narrative. Also, we’ll often see filmmakers in our festival explaining why their films aren’t porn. You can’t easily classify these things.”

This year Cinekink’s Tribute Award went to Bill Condon’s Kinsey with honorable mentions to Desperate Housewives, E!’s Dr. 90210, and Wedding Crashers, but the awards release highlights the festival’s best narrative and doc films. Eric Werthman’s Going Under, which stars Roger Rees, Geno Lechner and Miho Nakaido, won Best Narrative Feature, and Pornology New York (pictured), Michele Capozzi’s “gritty paean to underground New York, circa 1970-85, and four of its most colorful protagonists — Michele Capozzi, urban explorer and self-titled pornologist; Neville Chambers, founder of the infamous Fuck Factory; Lenny Waller, long-time front-man of the now-defunct Hellfire Club and renowned pornstar/mistress/shaman, Porsche Lynn,” won Best Doc.

Cinekink will be travelling its award-winners this fall, with the first stop being the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco November 3 – 5. For a list of winners visit Cinekink’s website.