Interview with Annapurna Sriram, Director of ‘Fucktoys’

Annapurna Sriram's Fucktoys, which won the Special Jury Award for Multi-Hyphenate at SXSW 2025, follows a sex worker (Sriram) in the dystopian city of Trashtown who discovers that she's been cursed and needs $1,000 plus a sacrificial lamb to break free. It’s a journey about spirituality, economics, and the particular exhaustion of being young and broke in late-stage capitalism.

"I wanted to bridge the gap between sexual acts and actual vulnerable intimacy between people," Sriram explains, "and not keep them as these weird polar separates of something that's purely pornographic or something that's purely saccharine, but something that could actually integrate them because that's what life feels more like, for me."

Fucktoys is a byproduct of Sriram's experience as a mixed-race actor who in her words got pigeonholed into stereotypical roles while living compartmentalized experiences being dismissed in Hollywood, yet fetishized in other corners of her life. "I would have these strange, disparate experiences of feeling at once wanted and desired and sort of objectified and fetishized, and at the same time, not good enough and dismissed and like stupid," she says. "In the center of it is this struggle that our generation is just facing: you need to make money, you need to get ahead, but you're constantly being dragged back into debt. There's this internalized feeling of being a failure, which is part of capitalism," Sriram says. "Recognizing that this isn't personal and this isn't you, but that this is a shared generational trauma, which is the curse."

Escaping the chokehold of capitalism goes hand-in-hand with spiritual salvation but in Fucktoys, spiritual salvation comes with a price tag — one that is inspired by Sriram’s own relationship with spiritual capitalism. "The whole movie was born from a psychic basically telling me to dump my boyfriend and then I did," she recalls. "Eight years ago, feeling kind of like, wow, I just really fell for something. Like, was I just conned?" 

Achieving that salvation comes at a cost though; in Trashtown, psychics charge specific fees, creating what Sriram calls a commentary on commodified spirituality. "I've spent so much money on psychics. It's embarrassing, and I probably should have just been paying a therapist. If you have the answer, if you have the thing that can save humanity, if you are enlightened, then you know that money and capitalism is bullshit," she argues. "Therefore, why do we see so many gurus, so many cult leaders, so many spiritual leaders passing out the coffers?"

After finishing the film, Sriram had an encounter with a psychic at a friend's bachelorette party who, upon hearing about the movie's plot, insisted that Sriram had "opened a portal" during filming and needed to pay for additional sessions to close it. "This is literally me living through the moment in my film when she's being basically spiritually threatened: if you don't come back and see me, bad things are gonna happen to you," Sriram recalls. "I think that's actually dangerous. If you're there for good intentions and you're there to actually help people, why do I need to pay? Just do it right now." The real-life reverb of her fictional narrative confirmed what she'd been exploring: "Sometimes they are right, but even if they are right, is it still worth it? Is it still worth the money that you're shelling out?"

In the same vein that Fucktoys prescribes spirituality as a cure, it also reminds us that everything can be spiritual. For Sriram, that outlet for spirituality was filmmaking. "When you write a script and you want to make a movie, and it's just you and your script, it's like your script has to become your faith to some extent," she reflects. "You have to talk about it, you have to preach, you have to have faith." The production demanded several forms of sacrifice: financial ruin, geographic displacement, social sacrifice. "We left New York, lived in Louisiana for a year. We both became incredibly broke. Financially, our credit cards, we can't even look at the balance." The commitment required saying no to other opportunities, "basically give up your life as you know it to live in the trenches."

But the ritual worked. "There is a curse that was broken," she says. "Before we shot the film, I lived in a lot of anxiety and fear of like, what if it never happens? We broke the fear curse of whether it's gonna happen or not." The finished film became its own breathing element, "like birthing something, but then at that point, it really becomes its own little person. It's not me, it really becomes its own thing. It really felt like a spiritual journey."

Annapurna Sriram’s latest project treats sex work and spiritual practice with equal seriousness. "I think sex work is work," Sriram declares. "It's labor, and it's not dissimilar to being an artist by any means." She draws explicit connections between artistic creation, spiritual practice, and sex work: "It involves going into strange places with a stranger and basically being vulnerable and being sort of open and accepting and allowing a lot of their energy in. It's like this almost erotic improvisation." This integration challenges conventional hierarchies that separate sacred from profane. "Both things require being bold, being unafraid to be in a space and being naked, vulnerable, whatever. That is art to some extent, and it requires a level of transcendence within yourself."

Fucktoys is built with precision and thoughtfulness, engineered with the ultimate goal of garnering empathy. In Fucktoys, the main character’s name is never spoken: she remains a surface of projection for others. "I wanted her to continuously be basically projected upon by the world around her," Sriram says. "Her actual individuality and identity isn't really important to the world around her." The anonymity is a blank canvas that lets viewers insert themselves into the character and her anxieties. 

Shot on 16mm when "nearly everyone has gone digital," Fucktoys makes aesthetic choices that feel deliberately anti-establishment. The film's "pure joy of being a girl in a girly landscape" represents what Sriram calls "female gaze" cinema in its entire visual and narrative approach. "Being a woman director, I carry exactly the experience that I was trying to tell in the movie," she explains. "I had a really hard time sometimes being taken seriously by my crew, by male producers. There was this sense sometimes that you can't be both things: you can't both be a smart director with a vision and this hot girl that's being sexual."

The resistance only strengthened her resolve. "You can be slutty and sentimental, you can be smart and have sexual agency. Both things shouldn't even be put in polar opposites because they're like chocolate and vanilla: they're just two different flavors that live together." 

Fucktoys is a reminder that the curse isn't supernatural but systemic, and the only way to break it is through the radical act of seeing clearly, even when the vision includes our own complicity in the systems we critique. In crafting a bridge between the sacred and illicit, the spiritual and economic, Sriram partakes in cinema that refuses to separate the body from the soul. The curse is capitalism, yes, but also our need to be saved by something more than ourselves.