Program 3: Global Shorts

Mother Melancholia
New York Premiere
Samantha Shay, 2022, Germany, 30m
Mother Melancholia by Samantha Shay is a multi-layered portrait of four women and a eulogy for the planet. Inspired by Sóley’s album of the same title, it serves as a self-proclaimed soundtrack for the end of the world as we know it. Co-commissioned by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the dance film approaches patriarchal politics and ecofeminism through an unguarded, unsettlingly beautiful meditation on the difficulty and immediacy of being fully present in the world. Filmed in a surreal and eroding Icelandic landscape, Mother Melancholia quietly yet urgently opens a conduit between the internal world of human experience and the planet we inhabit.

The Cell
North American Premiere
Po Cheng Tsai and Meng Hsueh Ho, 2022, Taiwan, 22m
In these post-pandemic times, a bright white light floods the stage and begins to speak: close your eyes, come with me toward the supernormal, let’s go, go to that transcendent space-time jump. Every character is in the dancer, so which one is real? On the verge of disassociation, light leaks into shadow, a new day dawns. Today, which self will go along?

Transparent
US Premiere
Siobhan Davies, 2022, UK, 35m
Transparent is a gentle manifesto and a visionary work of art. At the heart of the film are the reflections of dancer and choreographer Siobhan Davies as she unravels the complex processes that underpin a life’s work in dance. At the same time, she looks far beyond herself, touching upon the histories of movement embedded in each of us, allowing the watcher to enter a descriptive world and feel the weight of their own body walking or turning or falling. The images in the film echo Davies’s thoughts, showing the physical fluidity and depth of movement between all things. Many of these things are from the art world – from ancient sculpture through modern art and personal photos. The art is both tangible and intangible, and the dancer transforms it into something that can be held and used.