Movies

Breath

Rumania, 2021, 7‘48‘‘
Direction: Catalin Rugina

“Breath” aims to make a critical and ironic foray, in rhythm of dance, into the destructive universe of the human being. On a hot day, five young people get stuck with their car in the middle of a golden field. Suddenly, the trunk opens and the story begins.

„John L“ black midi 

U.S.A., 2021, 5‘15‘‘
Direction and Choreography: Nina McNeely

An absurdist dance and animation extravaganza about when cult followers turn on their leader.

Why Shouldn’t We Be Vulgar?

Rumania, 2021, 5‘37‘‘
Direction: Corina Andrian (Red-Cor)

Two friends get stuck in their own shirts and get lost in a dizzying dance. When they finally escape the darkness of the shirts, the girls turn into hungry moths whose only purpose is to get ahold of a mysterious travelling light. What would you do if you could fulfill your most ardent desire?

We Are Ready Now

United Kingdom, 2020, 1’39’’
Direction: Jack Thomson

Bodies navigate and self-organise as they run alone but dance together.

The competitive landscape is overwhelmed by public and personal spaces.

Actions act as the only markers in time, as they are reduced to noticeable and forgettable images.

Where are we in this moment?

Individuals unknowingly connected through unseen templates of social dynamic, captured in the container of the now.

The Step 

Estonia, 2019, 2‘09‘‘
Direction: Rain Jaaksoo 

A pair of worn shoes gets tired of laying on the bedroom floor and decides to take its owner for a walk outside. Their impetuous journey comes to a happy end.

Silk Paper and Bruises 

Sweden, 2021, 2‘55‘‘
Direction: Gabrielle Engdahl

Silk Paper and Bruises is an experimental dance film exploring norms and expectations in the dance industry where traditional stereotypes still are impactful. It takes us through a poetic experience of hungry dressing rooms, self-doubt and cracking bones. The film uses barbie dolls to portrait a bigger issue within the society of how women’s bodies are represented, presented and talked about.

Ma

Germany/Finland, 2020, 33’30’
Direction: deufert&plischke
Choreography: Kike García Gil, Simone Gisela Weber
Almost all people wear clothes, all their lives – inside and outside, day and night, alone and with others. Clothes are the boundaries to our skin and to everything outside. Clothes are made from fabrics that come from somewhere. Here they weave, there they sew. People make what they wear, people are what they wear. Clothes become too small, clothes are bought again, clothes are given away, clothes are exchanged. I am you and you are me.

In the film Ma, five pieces of clothing tell of their ghosts. This is how all the imaginary spaces appear between people and clothes, between fabric and life, imagination and skin.

Good morning, children

Ukraine, 2021, 4‘08‘‘
Direction: Elizaveta Pilugina

The film is about how it was, is, and how it can continue.
It is about pain, protest, struggle and passion in the eyes of children who want to be and live, not suffer.
Will we be able to overcome the “system” of education, will we be able to fix everything and wake up?!
Hey good morning!

Walks With Me

Finland, 2021, 10‘47‘‘
Direction and Choreography: Kati Kallio

80-year-old Sanna lives alone with her memories and houseplants. One day Sanna sees an event from her window that makes her reminisce about her friends and notice her own loneliness.

Frida

Israel, 2020, 2‘41‘‘
Direction: Tal Kronkop

Frida, my 92-year-old grandma, going through her daily choreography, opening up the windows.

vers la flamme 

Spain, 2021, 6‘00‘‘
Direction: Blas Payri
Choreography: Jasmine Morand

vers la flamme is a dance film around the conflicting passion and exhaustion of an elderly couple.
Based on the atmosphere and the movement’s quality of the stage piece Lui & Artemis, by Jasmine Morand, the film was shot in situ, to reinforce the human condition of an elderly couple living side by side in everyday surroundings.

Mareta (Please Yes: a lullaby)

Schweiz, 2018, 5’00’’
Direction: Blas Payri

This piece revolves around the support from mother to daughter and daughter to mother, with the participation of real mother and daughter Béatrice and Jasmine Morand. The camera dances with the characters to reveal the moments of contact and mutual support, the separation and reuniting and the evolution in time of the relationship between them.

Colours of Soul 

United Kingdom, 2021, 2‘22‘‘
Direction: Laura D’Asta

A silhouette emerges inhabiting oneiric landscapes.

Milk Tooth 

Brazil, 2020, 3‘23‘‘
Direction: Herika Reis, Maria Hermeto 

Inspired by the Greek film “Dogtooth” in which parents keep their children isolated from the outside world, “Milk Tooth” reflects on social isolation and the means of enabling encounters, even at a distance.
We create strategies to inhabit each other’s questions and rebellions, to vibrate at the same frequency. We must cherish and nurture the bodies in isolation.

Yurodivy 

Australia, 2021, 3‘51‘‘
Direction: Ryan Renshaw Choreography: Kyle Page 

Based upon the legend of Sisyphus and using the voice of the late-philosopher Alan Watts, Yurodivy explores contemporary humankind’s relentless pursuit for wealth and happiness.

[ship of fools] 

Rumania, 2021, 20‘31‘‘
Direction: Gabriel Durlan

[ship of fools] is a dance-film created as a ritual of embracing chaos and absurdity of daily lives. Four performers travel through a multitude of spaces, in an empathic ”sailing boat”, that allows them to encounter their complex inner worlds with patience and understanding, softening expectations and breaking down stereotypes. They embrace the diversity of feeling and behaviour, finding in movement creative and poetic ways that nourish their ability to embrace the unknown and to come at peace with the all-surrounding absurdity. Dance becomes a way to survive as a soul and to dive safely into your depths.

Insular Bodies

Germany / Greece 2020, 20′
Direction and choreography: Stephanie Thiersch

What happens when we horizontalize human and biological, flesh and stone, wind, water and hair? “Insular Bodies” draws our attention to the wacky entanglements between the human and the non-human, the living and the non-living, and develops poetic images of an ecology that does not show hierarchies but rather approaches utopian scenarios of consonance.

Georgia

Germany 2002, 27′
Direction and choreography: Stephanie Thiersch

At dawn, a café under dark trees. A poet scribbles his vision of utopian love on paper: Georgia. The guests of the café go crazy behind his back. His paranoid vision: at a quay of the Seine, Georgia rises from the water. But before he can touch her, the insignificant gust of wind that is only supposed to send the red paper on its journey brutally blows him onto a barge on the Pont Neuf.

Since the, incident, the ground beneath his feet begins to swim. A foray through surreal imagery in a nocturnal Paris begins. The settings transform into time-independent non-places, places of transfer into another, more real and unbiased existence.

Kinning #1-#6

Germany, 2021 
Direction: Stephanie Thiersch

Stephanie Thiersch was able to establish a continuous research practice with her company in the autumn and winter of 2020 where choreographic scores and ideas developed in the studio were transferred to outdoor space and examined in nature through the eye of the camera. Six cinematic miniatures were created which will be released regularly in March and April 2021

Swell 

Great Britain, 2021, 3‘21‘‘
Direction: James Kilpatrick, Mike Regan, Jack Morris 

It is a struggle to let go.

Folds of Wind

Egypt, 2021, 3‘18‘‘
Direction: Samir T. Radwan

A transformative journey expressing the process of navigating emotions mirrored in the forming and reshaping of white desert clusters.

True Sound Façade 

United Kingdom, 2020, 2‘30‘‘
Direction: Laura N-Tamara

True Sound Façade is a poetic dance and animation film in which a dancer realises their digital self feels truer than their real-world self. It stars Kino McHugh, dancing with and against a colourful animated environment born out of her movements. It’s an exploration of our multiplied, curated and fragmented identities, finding the ‘true sound’ of the self behind the projected ‘façade’.
By combining live-action and animation, the film becomes a celebration of how our inner and outer lives merge with each other playfully in the act of artistic creation.

Corpus 

Iceland, 2021, 4‘53‘‘
Direction: Klāvs Liepiņš 

Corpus is a delicate and philosophical take on death, body, shape and matter through movement.

ERÊKAUÃ

Brasil, 2021, 1’00’’ Direction: Paulo Accioly
Choreography: Ernane Ferreira 

Kauã dances in the hill, like a bird of prey.

Narrow Street 

France, 2010, 2‘27‘‘
Direction: Rebecca Macchia 

It takes place in a narrow street in Edinburgh. The viewer cannot see the performers face directly at first. Step by step the picture is opening and lets the viewer see more and more of the dancer.

SUPERSTORE APE

Canada, 2021, 3‘18‘‘
Direction: Allison Beda

A surreal site-specific public performance and exploration of our human evolution, and the struggle to connect with each other in an increasingly digital landscape, as we grown increasingly more addicted to our phones and devices.

Adapted from the one-woman stage show “I Can’t Remember The Word for ‘I Can’t Remember’” by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg.

8×8

Canada, 2020, 1’28’’
Direction and choreography: Maïza Dubhé

A mind isolated in a small 8×8 room. As the body moves, boundaries between mind, body and time start to stretch and dissolve; the room becomes her mind. A movement-based exploration of the effects of loneliness and restrictions.

Antipopping Chronicle Of The Northwest 

Mexico, 2021, 1’37‘‘
Direction: Daniel Ló-pez Bravo 

A popping dance video built into montage.

In Your Room

Italy, 2021, 2‘27‘‘
Direction: Alessandro Amaducci

There is a storm outside. You dance in an internal space that houses the danger that comes from the outside. Protect your breath, but dance anyway. It’s your room. In your room.

They Dance With Their Heads

Canada, 2021, 8‘27‘‘
Direction: Thomas Corriveau

The severed head of a choreographer is held captive by an eagle on a desert island. With a dazzling mastery of drawing and painting, this animated short unexpectedly takes us into the sensitive world of an artist madly in love with dance.

Salt Water I

U.S.A., 2017, 7’15’’
Direction and choreography: Abe Abraham

Dance-film set to the seismographic recordings of the Earth’s vibrations.

Persecuted

Brazil, 2020, 8‘19‘‘
Direction: Allegra Ceccarelli, Clara Eyer

Persecuted is a psychedelic ritual video dance, a witchcraft, an ode to women’s orgasms, fluids and waters. In a junction to the myths of the Monster-Goddesses Baubo (Greek), Kalih, Durga (Hindus) and Rangda (Bali), the female comes in the face of patriarchy.

Downriver 

Switzerland, 2020, 10‘00‘‘
Direction: Andrea Boll

Water – Leonardo da Vinci called it ‘the blood of the planet’. A group of people emerges from the water. They try to resist the current of the river and the stream of people in the city, but have to surrender to the flow and are washed ashore.
On the shore, the stranded seek for hold and refuge. In the course of the film ‘against or with the flow’, ‘resistance and devotion’ manifest as a primal instinct, as a survival strategy.

TRIGGER – FLUTTER 

Germany, 2021, 15‘00‘‘
Direction: Carlos Vasquez

TRIGGER is an audiovisual collaboration between musician/composer Stephan Meidell and Blank Blank Film. Hacking old, often obsolete equipment – an old Austrian Zither, analog synths, 16mm projectors, and mirrors – with trigger-based robotics.

The project’s visual concept – painting ink on transparent 16mm film triggered by music has been expanded, extracted, and exposed in a way only possible through the film format, and further intensified through dance. Instruments become bodies become movement become ink.

For Creation 

Australia, 2021, 7‘22‘‘
Direction: Deborah Louise Kelly

For Creation is an elaborate contemplation of the great weight, the myriad complexity, the glittering webs enveloping matter and sentience. Combining playful proposition, ardent queerness, elegy and homage, this new moving image artwork forms a call.

Made over three years, around entwined global crises of health, climate and justice, For Creation is animated paper collage constructed from the ruins of obsolete books

L’Appât 

China, 2020, 5‘51‘‘
Regie: Tang Chenglong

Three dancers, one kite, one hook, two cultures in one weird euphemism.

ZZZ – Zwischenlandung Zeche Zollverein 

Germany, 2021, 7‘02‘‘
Direction: Ya Chin Huang

Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, we could not dance indoors for a long time.

So I used to dance outside to techno music….

I came up with the idea of combining these two aspects!

Shut up and Listen 

Israel, 2021, 3‘49‘‘
Direction and Choreography: Maayan Reiter

How can we use our bodies in order to expand our ability to listen to one another? In what ways can physical movement convey what we wish to express? How can movement help to underline the dynamics of a dialog taking place and show our need for connection and mutual support?

This video is a result of a research on how certain themes of verbal communication, based on Non-violent Communication (NVC) principles, can be translated into physical movements of Contact Improvisation.

Dignity

Germany, 2021, 6‘02‘‘
Direction: Nadja Görts, Jens Wirtzfeld
Choreography: Nadja Görts

Is human dignity inviolable?
In the garden room of the Cromford mansion, four dancers grapple with their understanding of dignity. Dressed in workers’ overalls, they form a considerable contrast to the sumptuously furnished room, which was once facilitated by child labor in the 18th century.

The result is a kaleidoscope as versatile as the understanding of dignity itself.

SOLO

Belarus, 2020, 3‘16‘‘
Direction: Uladzimir Slizhyk

This film is questioning the notions of empty space, digital body and isolation.
[Glitches] caused by system/network errors, which appear in a digital body from time to time, configure a different perception of a body. And it is intriguing to me how that [glitched] visual identity of the moving body on the screen may help to reconfigure kinesthetic empathy of a viewer.

Before We Collide

United Kingdom, 2021, 1‘11‘‘
Direction : Guy Gooch, Gregor Petrikovic

In a haunting encounter, the film captures our fragmented perception of time during the pandemic while exploring the dynamics of mutual support.

The film does not give the impression that it is made for me, you, or anyone for that matter. It simply exists as an artefact that can be witnessed, like found footage of a ghostly apparition.

Fibonacci

Czech Republic, 2020, 8‘13‘‘
Direction: Tomáš Hubáček
Choreography: Marie Gourdain

Human flock flows through wavy fields. An unenlightened hunter crosses its path. Environmental dance film or audiovisual meditation on Fibonacci patterns in landscape, herd behavior, film structure and music.