Romanian filmmaker Adina Pintilie’s debut feature Touch Me Not provides a beautiful, powerful, intense look into the world of sacred intimacy and sexual healing. Slowly and tenderly, the semi-documentary introduces us to a handful of characters bravely exploring their relationships with their bodies, seeking community and guidance to transcend the limitations of inhibition, physical disability, grief, trauma, and fear. A stony-faced middle-aged woman (Laura Benson) engages a series of sex workers in an effort to understand and perhaps emulate their manifest comfort with their bodies and their sexuality. She spends a fair amount of time at a hospital, looking in on her elderly invalid father, who we eventually come to understand harmed her physically early in life. She also stumbles across a touch workshop for people with disabilities and becomes fixated on a tall bald fellow (Tómas Lemarquis) whose relationship with another workshop participant (Christian Bayerlein, a quadriplegic — he refers to himself as “a wheeler with SMA [spinal muscular atrophy]” — with remarkable self-awareness and body-positivity) is central to the film. The filmmaker herself and the camera equipment appear prominently in the film, highlighting the delicacy and the vulnerability of everyone participating in one of the most extraordinary films about bodies and sex I’ve ever seen. The scenes with sex workers — a handsome tattooed call boy, a transgender prostitute, and an extremely gifted London-based sacred intimate named Seani Love — as well as a scene in a BDSM sex club could all have been handled sensationalistically or mockingly, but they’re not.  I love films that take seriously and respectfully the quest for sexual healing, and I equally admire films that don’t overexplain everything that’s happening. Touch Me Not, which won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival last February, has a few more showings at the Museum of Modern Art through January 17. You can read the New York Times review (and watch the trailer) here.