There are a lot of niche film festivals in the world, but none quite like this one.

For five years now, BikeSmut has been traveling the world with a very specific mission. "Our only guidelines for submissions is that it involves bikes and sex," says Poppy Cox, BikeSmut's Creative Director. "People don't come if they're not into bikes and sex."

Cox says the festival was inspired by a unexpected commonality in festival's dueling elements. "It's an empowerment thing. Bikes are about being able to take control of your own transportation. You free yourself from the boundaries of a car. This translates into making your own pornography, and not letting other people define what is sexy for you." Cox sees parallels in the second-wave feminist embrace of pornography and the effect that bicycles had on the women of the nineteenth century. By being cheap, easily accessible personal transportation, "bikes changed the way women got around, the way they dressed, and they way they acted," she says.

By taking the "dirty movie" out of the realm of the secret and into the festival setting, BikeSmut seeks to demystify and thus redefine the form. "Distribution is a really big issue for us," says Cox. "People watch porn by themselves, but  we believe that it's really important to bring people together to watch this material, which could be considered obscene, and discuss it as a community." But the short films presented are not all traditionally smutty. "We want people to define for themselves what pornography is. It doesn't have to be graphic," Cox says. "I actually think mainstream action movies are more pornographic than sex. Better pornography is more thoughtful, and therefore more artistic. But we don't define it like that. We just want people to feel better about what they're seeing. We want people to discuss it."

This year's festival will make its first ever stop in Tennessee. "We didn't make it to the South last year, because we went to Europe for six months," says Cox. So the festival's Memphis stop will include elements of both last and this years' selection, including Memphis' own Corduroy Wednesday's "Confessions of a Pedalphile", a decidedly un-pornographic comedy short originally produced for last year's Live From Memphis Bikesploitation Film Festival. Cox says since there are way too many festival entries to show in the allotted time, "This is a Choose Your Own Adventure-style show," where the audience will be polled in real time to determine which movies will be screened. "We like showing how cool and sexy bicycles can be," says Cox.