6.11.2025, 20:15, Maxx 2
EN UT + Q&A
8.11.2025, 21:30, Maxx 2
EN UT + Q&A
9.11.2025, 12:30, Maxx 3
EN UT + KONTEXT TALK
The dancing body is a means of communication, healing, and transformation. Dancers move not just themselves but also social structures. Dance becomes a language when words fail. A demand when appreciation is lacking. Liberation when history is a burden. From Rio de Janeiro to New York’s ballroom scene of the 1990s to a gym in western Switzerland: in Your Space Is My Dancefloor, bodies reclaim spaces by dancing against systems that deny them freedom of movement.
Following Sunday's screening, Laura Kaehr will lead a discussion with filmmakers represented in our Focus: Motion in Motion and other guests. The conversation will focus on the political, social, and aesthetic dimensions of dance in film and explore how bodies use movement to make resistance, belonging, and new narratives visible.
Fantasma Neon
Leonardo Martinelli / Brazil 2021 / 20' / DCP / colour / Portuguese / Doc/Fic
João is a delivery man who dreams of having a motorcycle. He was told that everything would be like in a musical film.
Safe Space
Mirelle Borra / Germany 2020 / 10'1" / DCP / colour / English / Exp/Doc
The visual component of the video «Safe Space» is pieced together from numerous YouTube clips of ballroom events from the early 1990s, the time when the AIDS epidemic was surging in New York City. Originally a community created by trans and queer people of colour in response to a society that marginalized their presence, the ballroom community has influenced pop culture for decades, and its vocabulary has seeped into common parlance. «Safe Space» is narrated by AI-generated voices reciting experiences of LGBTQ refugees that have been sourced from the internet.
Ghost Dance
Emilia Izquierdo / United Kingdom 2019 / 4'35" / DCP / colour/black & white / no dialogue / Exp/Ani
Using as its base the 1894 filming of the Sioux American Indians dancing the «Ghost Dance», this piece explores dance as protest, dance as a form of resistance against injustice and the imposition of foreign powers. It uses hand-drawn animation and archival footage of the Sioux together with footage from protest dances in other locations such as Gaza, South Africa, Peru, Jerusalem, and Armenia, among others.
We Need New Names
Onyeka Igwe / United Kingdom 2015 / 13'30" / DCP / colour / English / Exp/Doc
«We Need New Names» is an essay video work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmaker's family matriarch. Using the personal archive of the grandmother’s funeral DVD, it explores the concepts of female identity, diaspora, cultural memory, and, most importantly, fiction.
Pidikwe
Caroline Monnet / Canada 2025 / 10' / DCP / colour / no dialogue / Fic/Exp
Featuring Indigenous women of various generations, «Pidikwe» integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future. The 16 mm film evokes the largely erroneous representations of early cinema and the exploitation of the female body by the colonial gaze. «Pidikwe» offers these women the chance to regain control of their image and embark on a process of self-determination, so that they can look to the future of cinema with serenity.
Maman danse
Mégane Brügger / Switzerland 2024 / 22'59" / DCP / colour / French / Doc
What remains of a mother after years of domestic violence? What remains of her body, her dignity, and her strength? Surely words, memories, and a few dance steps that can still be passed down.
