Film Categories: dance

  • The Story of the Dancing Heart

    A poetic, flowing Heart dances with ease day and night. A busy, curious Mind sets off on a journey to learn to dance as rhythmically and as elegantly as Heart. But the more desperate he becomes, the harder it gets. Maybe Mind will never encapsulate Heart’s lightness and innate delight. Or maybe music will show Mind the ways of the Heart.

  • Running In O&R

    Running In O&R occupies the conjunction of three crucial arts of the 1970s: performance art, experimental dance, and independent filmmaking. Running In O&R started as a performance piece for Missing Associates, Dudar’s partnership with dancer/choreographer Lily Eng. This film was shot at the original location of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), the city’s ”largest and most avant-garde” international art gallery. In Running In O&R, the performers run laps around the gallery space, keeping in step and using their natural strides. Consequently they go in and out of phase visually, as other complexities emerge. The establishing wide shot…

  • Every Day Burns

    Award winning pole dancer, Sada Velasquez, addresses the familial and social stigma she must overcome in order to pursue her passion for dance. Everyday Burns is a short documentary exploring one artist’s journey towards self expression and community empowerment. Every day Sada overcomes physical limitations, personal doubts and moral perceptions of others in order to create a safe space for folks to explore their sensual freedom.

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…

  • Full Service Automation

    “Full Service Automation” is a non-narrative experimental animation utilizing photocopied photographs. Characterized by movement that is barely possible, incoherent, or without apparent motivation, it is a deliberately broken or failed animation. The body here becomes something unpredictable and unknown, unattached from the usual meanings, but also seems to feel more intensely. The result is an unsettling and ambiguous immediacy that is identified with both suffering and pleasure.

  • Bellydance Vogue

    “My birthday was on the 3rd of April 2020, and for the first time, I celebrated it all by myself. But even if I was alone, I decided to celebrate it as if it’s the last one” The film was made during quarantine, using archive films from the 80-90s and using VHS recorder app.

  • RETRODREAMING

    “Retrodreaming” examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story – whether during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling “Kaidan “(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed “Kaidan” (Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for “Scary School Story”) in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo.…

  • temporal assemblages

    temporal assemblages is an ecological video poem exploring human presence and absence in natural and built environments. Although the performers in the film are directed within the frame, the locations serve as canvasses for improvisation and the landscape is an equal player in the narrative of the scene. A meditation on impermanence and the transience of place, the title is inspired by assemblage art where fragments of existing artistic objects are reconstituted into new artworks. The filmmaker here samples her own archive of media materials produced over several decades of practice, from analogue photography, Super-8mm and 16mm film recordings, early…

  • collapse

    a demonstration of falling techniques on super 8 colour stock

  • Searching for Justice

    Searching for Justice is a thought provoking short film by Tasha Brown that delves into the lack of fairness and equality, which is deemed insignificant in many societal norms. Fluid eclectic movements of dance are interwoven with the illuminating original spoken word written by poet Kells James.