Sara Blecher is well known in the film and entertainment industry as an award-winning film producer and director, and now she can add another profession to her cv, that of South Africa's first and only "intimacy co-ordinator".
She takes on this new role under the banner of SA's leading artist and management agency Talent-ETC.
This relatively new profession in the industry will see Blecher ensure the well-being of actors in theatre, film and TV, who are required to participate in sex scenes or other physically intimate scenes.
According to Wikipedia, this is how the unusual job came into being :
Tonia Sinia, later one of the founders of IDI: Intimacy Directors International, wrote her MFA thesis, entitled Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sensuality at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2006.
Demand for the role grew in the U.S. entertainment industry after the 2017 Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement highlighted the often routine nature of sexual harassment and misconduct in the industry. Actors such as Emily Meade began to demand professional safeguards for their well-being on set, noting that given the structure of power in a production, actors (particularly young, inexperienced ones) might otherwise not feel able to speak up if directors, staff members or other actors disregarded their consent or previous agreements regarding intimate scenes.[3] In 2017, the London talent agency Carey Dodd Associates fronted a campaign for an industry-standard in handling scenes of intimacy using guidelines developed by Ita O'Brien.[4]
In October 2018, the television network HBO adopted a policy of using intimacy coordinators for all its series and films with intimate scenes.[5] Intimacy coordinators and intimacy workshop teaching best practices for intimate scenes were also beginning to be used in London theaters as of 2018.[6]
In January 2019, Netflix released Sex Education, its first production that used an intimacy coordinator, Ita O'Brien.
