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Across
Borders

Interesting encounters between dance and film at the Berlin International Film Festival

by Katrin Bettina Müller

It's a true love affair between Nicolas Canniccioni's camera and the bodies of the six dancers in Pidikwe, a short dance film by Caroline Monnet, marketed internationally under the name Rumble. At first, the light dances only around the faces: one sees feathers and lace trembling, pearls and fur, while hands gently circle heads. Only then do the bodies come into view. As in the magnificent costumes, times and cultures meet in the vibrant movements of the dance, choreographed by Clara Furey. Ritual-like gestures mingle with revue and Charleston elements. Pearl necklaces and fringes fly in the turns, feet bounce in high heels, skirt hems bounce around rapidly moving legs. Something of the glamour of the 1920s shimmers through, but also of the exoticization of indigenous cultures in the entertainment industry. Self-empowerment and liberation also lie in the play with the mixed codes of the cultures.

Reversing Appropriation
Canadian director Monnet is also a visual artist and has already explored the two sides of her heritage, Canadian Algonquian and French immigrants, in video installations. At the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, Pidikwe was screened in the "Forum Expanded," the platform for hybrids between genres. The director emphasizes "that indigenous women are survivors of centuries of assimilation, abuse, exploitation, and dispossession of matriarchal values." The dance in Pidikwe rebels against this history of loss by interweaving traditional and contemporary elements, reversing cultural appropriation. Caroline Monnet herself is among the six dancers in the performance which develops an intoxicating pull to the electronic music of Alessandro Cortini.

Fatal Attraction
Cinema and dance can share their expressive powers. But dance can also become a purely scenic element, as in the Mexican feature film Dreams (in competition). Michel Franco tells the story of ballet dancer Fernando (Isaac Hernández, a Mexican, former principal of the San Francisco Ballet and now under contract with the American Ballet Theatre), who was once deported from the U.S. to Mexico. He crosses the border illegally and with difficulty and makes it to San Francisco, where Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) lives. She is wealthy and a patron of culture and dance, including projects in Mexico. Jennifer and Fernando had had an affair, and when they resume it, it takes a tragic turn because Jennifer cannot publicly acknowledge the relationship: she has Fernando deported, but wants to continue the relationship secretly in her house in Mexico. For Fernando, his talent as a dancer is also his ticket out of poverty. Scenes from a ballet company in San Francisco in which he finally believes he's on the path to his goal, tell this story. But just as Jennifer turns the young Mexican into a sex object in this unequal relationship, director Franco is less interested in Fernando's art than in his sexual charisma. He focuses primarily on the couple's erotic scenes which follow a not-so-subtle dramaturgy of dominance and submission. Sexual exploitation dictates the way the body is viewed; the young man from Mexico never really gets a chance.

Memories of the Holocaust
More captivating than this somewhat conventionally narrated feature film in the "Forum" section, Billy Shebar's documentary Monk in Pieces delves deep into the history of performance art, as body and sound, dance and music, poetry and theater liberated themselves from narrow genre boundaries in 1960s and 1970s New York. Shebar portrays Meredith Monk, composer, performer, choreographer, company director, and filmmaker, assembled like a mosaic. Recordings of early performances allow us to follow dances on vacant lots in the city, in parks, or in the spiral staircase of the Guggenheim Museum. Shebar's narrative is excellent, drawing on the original documents and bringing the artist's humor and spirit to life in interviews and animated dream sequences. One experiences intensely how voice and body become a versatile instrument: Monk uses them to shape landscapes, illuminate chapters of American history such as the arrival of emigrants to the U.S. at Ellis Island, or memories of the Holocaust, finding ever-new visual, choreographic, and compositional interpretations for her perspectives on a subject. One can only hope that this film makes it to the cinema.

Reconstruction and Loss
An unusual encounter with a Ukrainian dancer was made possible by Alisa Berger’s Rapture, a two-channel installation at "Forum Expanded". The story of Vogue dancer Marko Kolomytskyi is closely interwoven with the body's memory of a place that is physically lost. In a video, he wanders across the screen in a black nowhere: he can no longer return to his native Donbass, having lived in exile for many years, including Paris and Japan. He talks about this, and about his longing for his lost homeland in the Russian-occupied region. Finally, an experiment allows him to virtually return to his mother's apartment which was reconstructed from photographs using 3D scans. When he puts on the VR headset, he is overwhelmed, silent, and weeps — but then he reflects on his feelings of loss, the consequences of the war. They are incurable, despite this experiment. Switching to the second channel (the VR headset), you have a disturbing experience: The apartment, abandoned and half-dilapidated, is an inhospitable place. You can look around, peer into nooks and crannies, but you're increasingly moving into an abyss. In the end, the loss of this place in its virtual reconstruction is all the more painful.

Unfulfilled and Unattainable
Nelson Yeo is a young director from Singapore who presented his film Through Your Eyes in the short film program of the Festival. The real-life Singaporean disco "Hawaii Night Club" serves as the starting point: After the premiere, Yeo recounts how he was fascinated by this place, created long before his birth and frozen in the past, a club that increasingly resembles a retirement home. An elderly regular sits alone in front of his drink, losing himself in dreams. The owner of the establishment watches him resignedly through a crack in the door. A young dancer enters, a fixed smile on her face, and throws herself into grotesque poses. Soon the images tip into the surreal: the old man and the owner form a pair of lovers in front of the sunset, while the dancer and a delivery man dance hula waves around them (Tan Xin Yen, Lim Poh Huat, Doreen Toh, Edward Tan). In this short film narrative, dance is a cipher for the unfulfilled and unattainable.

Looking for an aspect that connects these diverse contributions beyond the context of dance, it becomes apparent that they often deal with overcoming boundaries, albeit within different frames of reference. In the feature film Dreams and the video installation Rapture, these are territorial and political boundaries; Monk in Pieces is about the boundaries between aesthetic genres, Pidikwe about historical and social attributions; Through Your Eyes traces the boundaries between dream and reality. All this makes these films interesting, even if they don't have much to say about dance itself.


Background photo: Film still from Pidikwe
© Caroline Monnet