Portland Dance Film Fest 2022 : Picks 1

Portland Dance Film Fest

Picks 1 showcases 13 films that share perspectives on what we are facing, questioning, processing, & healing in our collective bodies.

Portland Art Museum

Portland Dance Film Fest 2022

The 6th Annual Portland Dance Film Fest is a multi-day festival running October 7-9, 2022. Join us for 29 spectacular PDFF Picks curated from 12 different countries.  Each screening is a crafted evening of original and diverse dance film.

<p>We begin this year’s festival with a line-up of 13 films from Canada, the UK, Italy, France, and the US. Many of these films share perspectives on what we are facing, questioning, processing, and healing in our personal and collective bodies. Picks 1 begins on Portland’s own 82nd Avenue and closes on a dusky cliffside with a poem. In between we are shown stories that explore whimsy, repression, human and land, unification, immigration, and coming of age. With almost half of these films as solos, we are reminded of the time of alone-ness we are both coming out of and continuing to be with. We share these stories with respect and a hope that they will remind our audience that to witness someone’s story is an act of together-ness. Picks 1 runs 92 minutes with a 15 minute intermission. </p>

<h2>Picks 1  Program</h2><p><strong>Run Time: ~107 mins</strong></p>

<h3>1. Safe &amp; Seen on 82nd (United  States- Oregon Artist)</h3><p>A cinematic short set to Unit Souzou’s original taiko drum tracks illustrating the struggle of our Asian character to be seen. The struggle is both literal and metaphorical. Literal in that pedestrian safety in Portland’s Jade District, a four-lane busy thoroughfare in Portland, Oregon’s city center where multiple injuries and deaths have occured due to years of neglect and infrastructural racism. Metaphorical as our main character’s transformation depicts the struggle of Black, Indigenous People of Color to be seen. The many forms of racism present in our society presents an unsafe environment in the United States. Our character’s frustration and anger reaches a fever pitch internally to manifest an emotional turning point and determination to remain unseen no longer resulting in joyful release and internal peace.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>2. Red Line (United States)</h3><p>The flight or flight response to trauma in bodily form. Red Line examines the resilience of a Black woman in the face of allostatic load. Her reality is multidimensional, and her existence challenges the redlining of her identity.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>3. They Dance With Their Heads (Canada)</h3><p>The severed head of a choreographer is held captive by an eagle on a desert island. With a dazzling mastery of drawing and painting, this animated short unexpectedly takes us into the sensitive world of an artist madly in love with dance.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>4. I Just Wanna Dance	(United States)</h3><p>When two dancers are asked to partner at an audition, each struggle with the flip sides of homophobia before finding common footing. Set in a Victorian ballroom overlooking the San Francisco skyline, the dancers take a journey through genres of partner dancing, addressing homophobia and effeminophobia.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>5. An Evening With Taglioni (UK)</h3><p>Based on a true story from when legendary ballerina Marie Taglioni, the first woman to go 'en pointe', retired. Her pointe shoes were bought by a fan... Then cooked at a lavish dinner party and served to 35 guests.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>6. Suck It Up (United States)</h3><p>Heteronormative advertising campaigns tell men that they are weak, small, balding, and flaccid. These commercial images promise status, offer solutions to inadequacy, and breed entitlement.  Men mimic this commercialized masculinity, and act out when they are not rewarded.  Internalized deficiency creates a culture of resentment and has led to violence.  This film confronts the violent fallout.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>7. Fresh oranges into the ocean (Italy)</h3><p>While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality, and strength, they embark on a choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives. </p>

<h3></h3><h3>8. Seers (United States/Oregon Artist)</h3><p>Seers is a screendance exploring the feeling of a desert ecosystem and the frantic stillness of its inhabitants.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>9. amser / time	(United Kingdom)</h3><p>Moving through time along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay, we arrive at today's climate crisis. </p><p>Sarn Gynfelyn is revealed every low tide and looks like a road into the sea. In fact, it is a glacial moraine laid down 20,000 years ago when ice sheets melted, and it marks the beginning of the global conditions that have enabled human expansion. </p><p>At Borth, a 6,000 year old forest flourished for a few thousand years. Submerged by the sea, it has since been re-exposed in recent storms. Sarn Gynfelyn and Borth’s forest are both cited as supporting the Cantre'r Gwaelod legend of lost fertile lands in Cardigan Bay, but the geology tells a different story. </p><p>Moving forwards, we arrive at Fairbourne, a seaside town built on saltmarsh and English industrial wealth. It is now set to become the first UK town to be decommissioned due to sea level rise. It will be demolished and returned to salt marsh and will have existed for less than 200 years.</p><p> In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move, with arresting visual imagery through these three remarkable sites.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>10. The Space Between Us (United States)</h3><p>Sarah Crowell and Keith Hennessey are both dancers, teachers, and activists in the Bay Area. They have known each other for nearly 30 years. But they’ve never collaborated or connected deeply, until now.</p><p>The Space Between Us is a radical experiment in the power of bearing witness, inviting vulnerability, and sharing movement, in a time of social distancing and racial reckoning.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>11. ba(ME) (United Kingdom)</h3><p>ba(ME) sheds light on an intertwined journey of being both an immigrant in the UK and a minority artist in the dance industry. The short film explores situational experiences of being a 'model immigrant / minority', and adds to a dynamic conversation on immigration and diversity in the arts.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>12. Am I? I am. (United States)</h3><p>Inspired by the nursery rhyme "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," Am I ? I Am dives into the spiraling mind of a person deciphering what is real and what isn't. Am I here? Am I there? "Life is but a dream" so Am I dreaming? </p>

<h3></h3><h3>13. What I know so Far (France)</h3><p>Movement, words, a soliloquy.</p><p>A "keeping-track-of" small thoughts and knowledges.</p><p>A poem, written as a reminder.</p>

<h3></h3><h3>Learn More about the Picks 1 program in the <a href="http://portlanddancefilmfest.com/2022-picks-1" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Online Program</a> and find out more about the festival at <a href="http://portlanddancefilmfest.com/2020-picks-1" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Portlanddancefilmfest.com</a>!</h3>

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