Program 4: Global Shorts

OtroLado / OtherSide
Gabriela Cavanagh and Grace McNally, 2023, USA, 13m
New York Premiere
Spanish with English subtitles

When three of Cuba’s most celebrated dancers leave the national company to form their own trio, the pressure to succeed mounts. Meanwhile, they’ve given up the resources that supported them. Under the weight of their departure, they struggle and demand more of themselves and each other. In that tension, their creative capabilities rise and their relationships strengthen. Part documentary, part performance, OtroLado is a behind-the-scenes look as they test the boundaries of contemporary dance, friendship, and art.

Slipping
Karen Kaeja and Roshanak Jaberi, 2022, Canada, 21m
New York Premiere
Slipping is an intimate journey of four women’s lives as they slip between emotional and psychological torment. The characters coexist through their unfolding stories in a century-old mansion. Their only link to reality is each other. Conceived and filmed in rural Quebec with an all-female team, co-directors Roshanak Jaberi and Karen Kaeja set out to merge their artistic voices. The fictional and haunting narrative of Slipping was shot through the lens of cinematographer Olya Glotka and scored by Edgardo Moreno.

Thick Skin
Laura Steiner, 2023, Colombia, 3m
New York Premiere
Thick Skin is an ode to Bogotá, a bustling, warm, exciting, sexy, and tropical city both in people, liveliness, and attitude. It’s also a messy city, dangerous and unequivocally disparate. To be able to live in Bogotá means you have to constantly swap your skin—sometimes tough and reptilian in order to survive, and sometimes soft and porous to let all of the city’s life in. In Thick Skin, four bodies dance in contemporary movement through the city’s streets, while a poetic voice-over speaks of the need to have a thick skin in order to survive in this urban jungle.

Romance
Samantha Shay, 2023, Germany, 38m
North American Premiere
Multilingual film with English subtitles
Developed in close collaboration between director Samantha Shay and an intergenerational ensemble of dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal, Romance centers on the company’s first transgender dancer, Naomi Brito, and how her transition was catalyzed by the roles of women as she experienced them in the Pina Bausch repertoire. Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch’s iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio and inspired by the short story “It Was Romance” by Miranda July, the film dances on the fault lines between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present, and future. Through a fresh and powerful encounter, it assures that the power of an aging legacy is never-ending.