Ingmar Bergman Through the Choreographer's Eye (2016)

Bobbi Jene

A love story, portraying the dilemmas and inevitable consequences of ambition. It is a film about a woman's fight for independence, a woman trying to succeed with her own art in the extremely competitive world of dance.

Fårö Document

Bergman interviews the locals of Fårö in this fascinating documentary. An expression of personal and political solidarity with the fellow inhabitants of his adopted home, the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea, this documentary investigates the sometimes deleterious effects of the modern world on traditional farming and fishing communities. The young, especially, voice doubts about remaining in such a remote, quiet place.

Pina

Pina is a feature-length dance film in 3D with the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, featuring the unique and inspiring art of the great German choreographer, who died in the summer of 2009.

Gunnel Lindblom: ut ur tystnaden

The working class girl from Landala, Gothenburg, through the fine art of theatre and all the way to Hollywood.

Bergman: A Year in a Life

The year 1957 was one of the most prolific for the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman: he shot two films, released two of his most celebrated films and produced four plays and a TV movie while juggling with a complicated private life.

Gallant Indies

Stéphane Lissner, director of the Paris Opera, entrusts the staging of the opera-ballet Les Indes galantes to the visual artist Clément Cogitore. Based on the experience of his short film Les Indes galantes, the artist updates Jean-Philippe Rameau's baroque masterpiece (1735) by bringing together lyric song and urban dance. The choreography is entrusted to Bintou Dembélé who supervises dancers from krump, popping, voguing or even experimental hip hop. From rehearsals to the Premiere, Philippe Béziat films the meeting of urban dancers with the lyric institution and invites the spectator to share a human and artistic experience.

Making Dances: Seven Post-Modern Choreographers

Made in 1980, this film explores the contemporary dance scene through the work of seven New York-based choreographers. They discuss the nature of dance and the evolution of their own work. Filmed at rehearsals, performances, and during interviews, the film is a unique primary source. The artistic roots of these seven artists can be found in Martha Graham's concern with modern life as a subject for dance and in Merce Cunningham's emphasis on the nature of movement. In the 1960s, the interaction of art forms generated choreographic innovations. Especially influential was John Cage, whose radical ideas served as a point of departure for much of the new choreography. Each of the choreographers in Making Dances draws inspiration from the Graham/Cunningham tradition, yet each makes a highly distinctive statement. Structure, movement in non-fictive time and space, and the nature of movement itself are recurring themes.

A Dancer's World

A glimpse into the world and methodology of dancer Martha Graham.

Appalachian Spring

A filmed version of Aaron Copland's most famous ballet, with its original star, who also choreographed.

One Day Pina Asked...

Chantal Akerman followed famous Choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers, The Tanzteater Wuppertal, for five weeks while they were on tour in Germany, Italy and France. Her objective was to capture Pina Bausch's unparalleled art not only on stage by behind the scenes.

Trespassing Bergman

In the sixties, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) built a house on the remote island of Fårö, located in the Baltic Sea, and left Stockholm to live there. When he died, the house was preserved. A group of very special film buffs, came from all over the world, travel to Fårö in search of the genius and his legacy. (An abridged version of Bergman's Video, 2012.)

Mirrors of Bergman

Filmmaker Kogonada reflects on women and mirrors in the films of Ingmar Bergman.

Text Messages from the Universe

A film that immerses its audience in subjective states of consciousness they might experience when they die, imagining what they can see and think and hear in a seamless but fragmentary flow of poetic images, words and music. The viewer undertakes a journey into their own interior world of dreams and projections in which time and space, and cause and effect logic, are turned on their heads. Text Messages from the Universe is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text which guides souls on their journey of 49 days through the 'Bardo', or intermediate state, between dying and rebirth.

If the Dancer Dances

Filmmaker Maia Wechsler follows choreographer Stephen Petronio as he prepares dancers to restage the 1968 production of "RainForest."

Bergman Island

An English-German filmmaking couple retreat to Fårö for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place that inspired Ingmar Bergman. As the summer and their screenplays advance, the lines between reality and fiction start to blur against the backdrop of the Island's wild landscape.

Untitled (Without Sound)

A highfalutin art movie crumbles into a meta-fictional disaster that betrays its director’s incompetence in real time, and it’s all on film.

Night and Day

When his first stage show fails, songwriter Cole Porter goes off to fight in WWI until, injured, he lands in a hospital. He impresses nurse Linda Lee with his creativity, but their budding romance must wait as Cole heads home. Back in New York, he mounts a series of popular shows, and when his work brings him back to Europe, he eventually marries Linda. But success doesn't spare him from marital complications or bad news about a beloved relative.

Mari

Modern dance is an evocative narrative tool in Georgia Parris' debut, which investigates a young woman's identity and the complex relationship she has with her mother and sister.

Sand

The grandmother figure in the story is an “artistic speaker” who performs in town but seems enigmatic to her own granddaughter. Over the course of the narrative, the granddaughter realizes that, far from succumbing to despair in old age, her grandmother is full of “young laughter that has found its way back to an old body.”

The Very Eye of Night

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

Center Stage: On Pointe

Jonathan Reeves is tasked with infusing more contemporary styles and modernism into the American Ballet Academy, and enlists his top choreographers Charlie, Cooper and Tommy to recruit dancers to compete at a camp where the winners will be selected to join the Academy. Bella Parker, who has always lived in the shadow of her hugely successful sister Kate, finally gets her chance to step into the limelight as one of the dancers recruited for the camp.

Eifman Ballet: The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov novel is the epitome of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s creative work, the acme of the philosophic investigation carried out by this colossal and restless mind throughout his life. World renowned choreographer Boris Eifman offers a remarkable vision of the core ideas within the novel, expanding upon them though body language as a way of exploring the origins of the moral devastation of the Karamazovs; creating through choreographic art an equivalent of what Dostoyevsky investigated so masterfully in his book, the excruciating burden of destructive passions and evil heredity. This ballet production is also known and performed as Beyond Sin.

Play Hard

Nate, a workaholic drummer, spends all his time practicing, always striving for perfection. After he meets Yazmine, a like-minded, dedicated modern dancer, he realizes that the key to success isn't just to work hard – sometimes it requires you to play hard.

Free Noir Papillon

A short dance film about a mother’s relationship to her pregnancy, as she deals with fear and hope about bringing a black baby boy into the world in 2020.

The Dance of the Damned Women

The film shows four women moving in a crowded, closed room to the music of Monteverdi. They represent women living by passing on a role that is passed down to them for generations. Two of the dancers are damned souls that come to life, the third is death and the fourth a child born free, but forced into the other female roles.

Zanni

A period drama set between Scotland and Italy.

Fröken Julie

Birgit Cullberg's 1950 dance adaptation of Miss Julie was the breakthrough for modern dance in Sweden. 30 years later one of her sons plays the role of Jean in this adaptation for TV.

Limbus

As Alex struggles with disturbing hallucinations, his wife Vera tries to help, until they both experience their own profound revelations.

Fröken Julie

A well-composed psychological dance drama of a completely different kind from the usual romantic and sometimes superficial ballets. And an intrusive interpretation of August Strindberg's play.

Fibonacci

A human flock runs across the landscape of fields. Thirteen performers in a teardrop formation form a single organism, guided by collective intelligence or intuition. It flows across the landscape of geometric patterns over terrain waves, flows around copses, divides, regroupes, and reunites. It stops at the horizon, rests, and runs on. The contrast between lively movement and the immobile geometry of the landscape. A hunter enters this magical moment. He walks across the field, climbs into a hunting blind, and loads his shotgun. The unsuspecting flock continues its light-footed, aimless journey.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

How Good to See You Alive

Four years after a military coup overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, all civil rights were suspended and torture became a systematic practice. Using a mix of fiction and documentary this extraordinary film is a searing record of personal memory, political repression and the will to survive. Interviews with eight women who were political prisoners during the military dictatorship are framed by the fantasies and imaginings of an anonymous character, portrayed by actress Irene Ravache.

Brimstone & Glory

Tultepec, Mexico is known for just one thing: fireworks. The city manufactures more than half of all fireworks made in Mexico, a good percentage of which will be set off at the small town’s annual festival for San Juan de Dios.

Billion Dollar Bully

Today consumers Yelp everything from restaurants to dentists; plumbers to surgeons. The small business community sees Yelp's sales tactic as extortion. Does Yelp genuinely have an interest in helping people support the best local businesses, or are they a pay-to-play advertising platform?