Brief encounters of the animal kind: Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno

Isabella Rossellini has found her calling, as the director and presenter of Green Porno, a series of beautifully hand-crafted short films about the sex lives of animals

There are certain things you don't expect to hear Isabella Rossellini say. Things like, "I have sex several times a day. Any opportunity. Any female." Or, "To have babies, I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position." Or, "When needed, I can have an erection six feet long." But there are plenty of delightfully unexpected things about Green Porno, Rossellini's series of short films about the sex lives of animals, the second batch of which has just gone live on the Sundance Channel's website.

The first season, made last year, marked Rossellini's debut as a director. She had collaborated with Guy Maddin on My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her film-maker father and fellow nature enthusiast Roberto, but she had always struggled over projects of her own that would stretch to television, let alone feature-length. When she learned that Sundance was fishing for attention-grabbing short content suitable for digital platforms, it proved the perfect outlet for her brief directorial attention span, as well as an opportunity to explore her longstanding love of zoology. "And when I thought 'capture people's attention,'" she says on a behind-the-scenes clip available at the project's microsite, one word came to mind. "Sex."

And so Green Porno was hatched. In each of these very short shorts – none lasts longer than three minutes and up to two-thirds of the running time is taken up with credits – Rossellini expounds with relish upon the mating habits of a particular species. Assuming the first person (or first creepy-crawly), she plays the male, garbed in a series of gloriously expressive handmade costumes in the bold colours and shapes suited to smaller screens; if the distribution model is hi-tech, the aesthetic approach, courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-turned-production designer Andy Myers, is decidedly handcrafted. Byers' costumes are made mostly from paper, eschewing digital effects for hands-on craft. Think Michel Gondry meets David Attenborough in the Blue Peter studio after dark.

Rossellini takes the biology seriously. "When I write the script," she notes, "first I do the research, the scientific research, then I try to simplify it as much as I can and make it funny. Then I have to imagine how it can translate in this sort of theatre that we do here with puppetry and me dressed up as the animal ... It's funny but it's a little sick too. And also very informative."

In the first series, Rossellini enthusiastically portrayed, among other things, a bee bleeding to death after leaving its penis inside its mate (as they do), a mantis having its head rather frighteningly chewed off in flagrante delicto ("I keep copulating. Nothing stops me. I keep going! Sex!") and a snail clamped to its partner, dart-like appendages jabbing away ("I use them to inflict pain on my partners before mating – it turns me on. I love to be hurt too. Sadomasochism excites me"). The run ended with a strangely endearing shot of her severed head playing host to gestating maggots.

In the new batch, the theme has shifted underwater and the scale is no longer restricted to the miniature. Lessons are offered on the hydrodynamic shortcomings of a hefty whale penis, self-cloning among starfish and the extraordinary length, relative to its body, of the barnacle's nob. You haven't really lived until you've seen the look on Rossellini's face as a 20-foot handmade penis snakes its way from her clavicle to the other side of the room.

In fact, her charmingly sexy performance is integral to these shorts' successful character, whether she's strolling through a forest of eight-foot-tall, frilled, barbed and spiralling phalli or noting how important it is that her vagina's shape is "species-specific, so that I'm not screwed by a bear". What other actor could bring both coquettish charm and unbridled glee to the declaration "We are sequential hermaphrodites!" – delivered while wearing a limpet shell at a rakish angle?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/apr/01/isabella-rossellini-green-porno-sundance