Growing up in Alexandria, writer and director Zach Clark wasn't too into the Northern Virginia fetish scene. So when he began work on Modern Love is Automatic, a film about “a nurse who, on a whim, takes a side job as a dominatrix,” he enlisted the help of local sex workers to fill in the gaps.

“Very early on in the process, I tried to get a dominatrix in the area to at least read the script, and hopefully to come on board as a technical adviser,” says Clark, 28. "No one would return my e-mails."

Though Clark says he had "wanted to do the nurse-dominatrix thing for a while,” his 2005 script on the subject lacked a professional touch. "The script largely relied on my general conceptions of what would happen in that situation," he says. So Clark says he scoured "lists of dominatrixes online" for local dominant women versed in the ritual punishment of their male sex partners, then sent out stock e-mails to each one explaining the film's consulting needs.

When no local dominatrices bit, Clark looked further afield. He eventually located a woman in New Jersey who agreed to fact-check the film, in which an amateur dominatrix dressed in a black pleather catsuit treats her clients to a series of verbal and physical absuses in hotel rooms.

The Jersey dom "gave us a lot of very simple notes, mostly on the business side," Clark says. "In one scene, I had someone paying [the dominatrix] with a check. She said, 'no one would ever pay with a check.'" But Clark says he largely disregarded his consultant's performance-based concerns. "The character in the film isn’t a particularly good dominatrix," Clark says. "She’s new at it. It’s not really her forte."

In August of 2007, Clark shot the 93-minute feature, largely in Alexandria; other regional locations included a Maryland mattress store, where one character works as a sensual bed model, and the basement of Adams Morgan bar Asylum, which doubles as a professional sex dungeon in the film. Clark says that fetish consulting on the film didn't delve into any regional peculiarities of the D.C. metro area. “I wouldn’t say that D.C. or Northern Virginia is a character in the film, but I certainly wasn’t trying to disguise it," Clark says. While a few direct references to the region were scrubbed out of the script, the landscape of the film is recognizable; one scene is explicitly set in Annandale, Va.

This Saturday, Clark, who now lives in Brooklyn, will finally get a chance to check out the D.C. area fetish scene firsthand. The film's Saturday screening at Cinekink will be followed by “a BDSM play party" at local "for-profit Pansexual Alternate Lifestyles" dungeon The Crucible. Clark is not yet committed to attend. “Some friends of mine from the area might show up, so I may end up just doing something with them after the movie,” Clark says. “But it might be worth it to watch things get started.”