THE FOUR FILMS

Across two days, MOVING PICTURES travels across cultures, eras, and cinematic traditions. The films take audiences from Roma cultural traditions rooted in India and carried across Europe, to German dance theater, the golden age of American musical cinema, and the classical dance traditions of India.

Each film is paired with a master artist whose own dance tradition and embodied knowledge offers a unique perspective on the themes within the film.

October 17th, Day One

3:00 DOORS OPEN

3:30 Opening Ceremony by Dr. Eddie Madril- a member of the Pascua Yaqui tribe of Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora Mexico. He is an active member of the Native American community and a representative of his culture through various aspects: as a dancer, singer, teacher, playwright and filmmaker.

Film 1:

4:00pm FILM START TIME

LATCHO DROM (1993), directed by Tony Gatlif

Cultural Memory and Migration

This visually and musically immersive film traces the journey of Roma culture from its origins in India across Europe, culminating in flamenco. Dance and music become living archives of migration, identity, memory, and cultural continuity.

A master flamenco artist will explore the relationship between movement, cultural memory, and the journey of traditions across borders and generations.

INTERMISSION: 5:45-6:15

Film 2: SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952), directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

6:15pm FILM START TIME

Surrealism, Musical Theater and Cinematic Dance

Set within Hollywood’s golden age of musical theater, this classic culminates in Gene Kelly’s extraordinary, nearly 15-minute dream sequence, in which an endless expanse of silk, shifting sets, theatrical illusion, and dance transform the screen into a surrealist landscape.

A master dance artist, former New York City ballet dancer, will consider how choreography, costume, fabric, scale, repetition, and cinematic editing create a dream world that could not exist on stage in quite the same way and how dance, music, visual art, and camera movement converge to create one of cinema’s most enduring surrealist dance sequences.

October 18th, Day Two

DOORS OPEN 3:30

FILM 3: KALPANA (1948)

Directed by Uday Shankar

4PM FILM START TIME

Dance, Imagination, and Cultural Renewal

Uday Shankar’s Kalpana is a landmark of Indian avant-garde cinema—and the only film he ever directed. A surrealist dream-film-within-a-film, it blends dance, fantasy, modernist choreography, elaborate visual spectacle, and social commentary into an extraordinary cinematic vision.

The film was restored under the direction of Martin Scorsese through the World Cinema Project, bringing Shankar’s singular work back to audiences in a new generation.

A master dance artist from the classical Indian dance tradition will offer audiences insights on exploring Shankar's synthesis of Indian dance traditions with international modernism and his radical conception of cinema as a medium for choreography, imagination, and cultural renewal.

INTERMISSION: 5:45-6:15pm

Film 4: PINA (2011), directed by Wim Wenders

6:15pm FILM START TIME

Rhythm, Embodiment and Nonverbal Communication

Wim Wenders’ landmark film brings the work of choreographer Pina Bausch and Tanztheater Wuppertal to the screen, revealing how gesture, rhythm, physicality, theater, and music can communicate experiences that words cannot.

A master dance artist from the West African dance. tradition will offer a perspective on embodied and nonverbal communication, expanding the ways we think about rhythm, gesture, expression, and how bodies communicate with one another.

Together, these four films offer distinct perspectives on dance and the moving image, spanning migration and cultural memory, nonverbal communication and embodiment, the evolution of theatrical dance in American cinema, and the preservation of classical Indian artistic lineage.

The result is a conversation between cinema, live movement, and living cultural knowledge, inviting audiences to see familiar and unfamiliar dance traditions through new perspectives.

Four films. Four dance traditions. Four artist perspectives.

Contact the host of Moving Pictures: An International Dance Film Series