Starting with a man sitting in a park, and pulling back to take in the city skyline, a stately drone shot is just one indication that 2019’s HUMP! Film Festival has done some growing up.

After 15 years, there’s less of the enthusiastic amateurism that characterizes this touring road show of homemade porn. There’s some, but there’s also a lot of sleek visual literacy and convincing technical chops, with opener “Wildfire”—a baroque orgy of group-fucking, lactation, and pyro—setting the tone for much of what follows.

If that one looks like it was made by Gaspar Noé, “Good Kitty” brings a picturesque gauziness to the tender lovemaking of two attractive young hipsters, while “Doppelbanger” abstracts all its swollen ball sacs and gravity-defying penises into a vertiginous, magenta-drenched flesh collage.

Best of all, arguably, “Photuris” is spiked with brilliant visual puns, like the confetti cannon that discharges between the legs of its orgasmic female participant.

Originated by columnist Dan Savage back in 2005, this annual, sex-positive celebration of the dirty movie is notably high on inclusion and variety. Transgenderism and squirting meet for the first time in HUMP! history with “The Pizza Topping”, which otherwise has fun with the squeeze-cheese aesthetics of adult filmmaking in the VHS era.

Inside a construct suggesting Mump and Smoot as directed by the Quay brothers, “Butt Bango” keeps swapping its two participants—one with a strap-on, the other with the real thing, both with fright wigs—so that we’re never sure which is what, or who is doing whom. The nerd patrol in “Roll Play” go gender-fluid when their D&D characters blossom into real life, and “Fuck First” heaps on the irony (and the polyester) when a ’70s key party turns out to be less straight than we might expect.

With its image of a naked woman left shivering and chained on a concrete floor after being waterboarded, you might say that the lesbian S&M tale “Tell Me What You Like” is the most intense of the festival’s 21 shorts. (But hey, it’s what she likes!) Elsewhere, matters are leavened by the nudity-free “Orally Fixated” and the paper animation of “Cock Tales”, a urophagic take on Cruising as if it was made by the NFB.

Notably, the two most affecting shorts—and likely audience favourites—both bare their emotions as much as they do anything else. A years-long story of miscarriage, birth, sexual dysfunction, and valedictory squirting (!) is beautifully contained within the five minutes of “Lost and Found”. And HUMP! finally manages the goal of eating itself when a young duo attempts to re-create the festival’s most common tropes, hitting the trail for some outdoor rutting, and variously toying with body paint, flashpaper, and genital puppetry.

Clearly made without a crew by a real couple, their peals of intimate laughter when the googly eyes fall off a gimp mask end up being the sexiest thing in the entire program. Naturally, this one is called “Best in Show”.

Hosted by Dan Savage, the HUMP! Film Festival comes to the Rio Theatre for four nights starting Wednesday (November 13). More information here