PARIS

IT isn’t often that the director of an international film festival faces a possible prison sentence simply for showing a movie. Yet Ángel Sala, of the Sitges film festival in Spain, has been charged with exhibiting child pornography at an adults-only screening of “A Serbian Film” during that festival’s prestigious annual showcase for fantasy and horror movies last October.

Audiences can judge just how extreme “A Serbian Film” is now that two different versions, both released on Friday, are playing in at least eight North American theaters and on the Internet. Set within Serbia’s pornographic film world, the story focuses on Milos, a retired performer who is lured into accepting the lead role in one final “art house” pornographic film to overcome his family’s financial struggles. The catch: the film’s devilish director won’t tell his star what happens in the script. Milos must simply be himself.

What follows — bondage, sexual torture, necrophilia, even murders via sexual penetration — is intended to be a metaphor for modern times, in which characters in a dehumanized world must “rape or be raped,” as the film’s director, Srdjan Spasojevic, wrote by e-mail.