Program II: Shorts Program

SHIFT
Claire Marshall, Australia, 2019, 30m
Dance on Camera Festival Best of Fest 2020 Selection
Taking an eight-minute duet situated in various locations and repeated four times, choreographer Claire Marshall investigates how one’s sense of “story” shifts with the consideration of setting, cinematic elements, and editing.The duet explores a discordant couple stuck in a rut, looping manipulative behavior as the four stories eventually  merge into one. An unconventional production, Shift allowed its artists and locations to shape the story rather than hewing to a prefabricated narrative. Shift won the audience choice award for the 48th Dance on Camera Festival NYC in 2020 in the 20-40 minute category. In 2020 Shift won the cinematography award at the Silk Road Film Awards, Cannes, won the Close Up San Francisco Short Film Festival(experimental category) in 2021 and was a finalist for an Australian Dance Award in 2020. Shift has been screened as a featured work at Dancehouse Melbourneas a part of the Melbourne Fringe Festivalin 2020, and programmed as an ‘official selection’ in the Cascadia Dance Film Festival(Canada), Birmingham International Dance Festival, and Obskuur Ghent Film Festival, Belgium in 2021.

BEND
Susan Misner, USA, 2019, 11m
Dance on Camera Festival Best of Fest 2020 Selection                             

A young Caucasian woman brings her African-American boyfriend to watch her younger brother’s high-school football game. They’re in her hometown. The National Anthem begins. Her boyfriend takes a knee.

What follows is a study of bias and betrayal, of righteousness, loss, and mercy. Bend chronicles America’s dark history of fear and violence, and its perpetual inability to bridge turbulent divides.

Preceded by

OUTSIDE IN
Margaret Williams, UK, 1994, 14m
Dance on Camera Festival Best of Show 1994 Selection

Outside In is a film for six dancers, drawn from the Candoco Dance Company, a group of physically disabled and non-disabled dancers. It was the first collaboration between choreographer Victoria Marks and director Margaret Williams. Outside In is a witty and affectionate mix of trails, tracks, blue skies and hidden surprises. The film leaves a lasting impression of continual movement: a seamless stream of images, human imprints, and revelations.

As winner of the 1994 Screen Choreography award at Dance Screen, Best of Show at Dance on Camera New York, the Prague d’Or, the Golden Antenna of Bulgaria, and the Film Board of Canada Creativity Award, Outside In is one of the BBC’s most honored arts films.

We’d like to dedicate this screening to the memory of David Toole, who died in 2020 at the age of 56. David was a world-renowned disabled dancer who defied preconceptions about dexterity and beauty. His combination of physical power and delicacy was bewitching.

COUP DE GRÂCE
Clara van Gool, Netherlands, 2011, 26m
Coup de Grâce is a dance film about the demise of a friendship. Jordi Cortés Molina plays a proud aristocrat who has been hurt in the past. His childhood friend (Damián Muñoz) is his fanciful opposite. After a long separation, the two men meet again in a massive building. During an evening and a night they have an exhaustive duel without any weapons. Coup de Grâce is a cinematic adaptation of the presentation of Ölelés from Molina and Muñoz, based on the novel Embers by Sándor Márai (1942). It is a tale of revenge for wounds that never heal despite the passage of time.