About this Short Film
A solo and community movement score in a wintery Lake Michigan and prairie landscape that follows a disabled dancer’s ongoing healing from a car accident thirty years ago that left her with partial amnesia and a rearranging of her earlier memories. The dance uses sound, meditation, eco-poetic material engagement and community movement practices to track and heal old wounds. Winter, water, land and life: what survives, what remembers? Winter cocooning: to be held, to be emerging. Geological investigations layer the earth and her memories, arranged, compressed, unfolded in rock time. Earthy crystalline rhythms of the prairie and the lake twine with human care rituals into an eco soma dance.
Film Details
Film Transcript
The car is upside down. It has slid on black ice. I can't remember. Rotate, rotate, rotate. A cocoon of seat belt crisscrossed over my breasts, holding me. Blood drops seep from my wrist wounds. A red lake begins to congeal. Emergency vehicles flash across the white field. I can't remember faces: the driver, maybe hands, maybe a wolf sitting by the motorway side in the deep field, looking at me as I awake to the flashing lights. What have you run away with? What is lost beneath the skidding tyres? What is smashed beneath the roof? The world is upside down and there is no home for me in this world.
I become a bird of paradise stalking the streets of Hamburg in strange eye makeup. I sleep with the organist. Wolf watches me now as I remember the gap. Remember the fact that I forgot. Even if I can never recover that life from that year, I did not remember to remember that year 30 years ago. A broken line, a nonconformity in the rock strata. Upheaval as red magma pours into the rift. Old material crumbles atop newer memories. I dream that ice melts in the earth's heat. Beneath the ground, flowers, geothermal warmth: a watery mother that welcomes my frozen limbs.
Filmmaker
Petra Kuppers is the filmmaker behind this entry. See every Focus on Ability entry from Petra Kuppers.
Want to hear how the festival goes?
We will email you when voting closes and the winners are announced. Nothing else, and you can stop any time.