Virtual Screenings 2025

Between video and animation, Naan is a dreamlike creation on the dancer’s body.

Convivencia brings to light the lives and stories of female essential laborers along the US/Mexico borderlands through Tap dance, Son Jarocho, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The film highlights interviews with migrant domestic laborers from La Colectiva de Mujeres, a female-led collective of domestic workers in California. The film addresses the struggles, resistance, and resilience of these women to showcase their significant contributions to our communities and celebrates their spirit of community, joy, and resilience. Convivencia is a unique fusion of oral histories, percussive dance, footwork, and folkloric dance from choreographer/director Vanessa Sanchez in collaboration with filmmaker John Jota Leaños.

A site-specific screendance work inspired by Donna Haraway’s Regenerative Politics for living together in a multi-species world.

Les Caminantes journeys into a poetic exploration of identity and belonging in the emerging peruvian ballroom kiki scene. Director Wachafo approaches the community’s cultural expressions through its body language as a form of resistance against Peru’s conservative society.

An island is more than land and sea—it has a soul, a presence, a living face that shifts with time and movement. Airaferma is an immersive audiovisual journey, written and directed by Asun Noales and Federica Fasano, that seeks to capture the essence of Tabarca through the language of dance. With the island as both stage and inspiration, filmmaker Germán Antón weaves a dreamlike narrative where the body of the land and the bodies of the artists become one. Music, movement, theater, photography, and videography merge, giving rise to a singular, ever-changing expression—wild, fluid, and deeply human. Created during the first Residencia Petricor, supported by the Instituto Alicantino de Cultura Juan Gil Albert and the Diputación de Alicante.

A young woman, dressed in a tracksuit, walks through the backstreets of Sevilla into a housing project. This is Carmen Aviles – the young street superstar of flamenco.

How does María Pagés’ thinking work? Where do her movements come from? What inspires her dancing? Starting with the staging of one of her latest shows, “De Scheherezade”, at the Roman Theatre of Mérida, we delve into her creative process, a process that she has shared for more than ten years with the poet, writer, and dramaturg El Arbi El Harti. Both helps us to deconstruct scenes and draw a line that links with their previous works. By means of a fine sense of humor, the couple reveals to us the happiness and difficulties of living and working together. María Pagés shows herself to us as a woman whose life has its center on stage, in her way of understanding flamenco. Her dance seems to be something close to meditation and her creative process, a kind of trance.

Beneath the war-ravaged streets of Ukraine, a woman exists in an underground bomb shelter—a space that is both refuge and purgatory. Within these cold, breathing walls, time folds in on itself, revealing the unbroken cycle of war. She is not merely hiding; she is witnessing. Through echoes in the shelter — whispers of the past, fragments of the present, and the shadow of the future — she lives the stories of those who came before her. A child is born, only to be handed a rifle. The shelter absorbs these voices, transforming them into an eerie chorus of remembrance and inevitability. As she navigates this liminal space, she begins to see herself not as an individual but as part of a larger mechanism — a machine that recycles life into war, soldiers into ghosts. Her own body is both creator and casualty, her existence reduced to the paradox of giving life only for it to be taken away. As explosions rumble above, she is left with one question: Is escape possible, or is war the only inheritance? In the shelter, everything begins, and everything ends.

A young woman is trapped in emotional limbo after years of social suppression in Iran. She is suspended in stillness as life echoes faintly around her. Distant explosions punctuate her isolation, and every attempt to move forward is disrupted by external forces. As she gradually dissolves into nature, the film meditates on the fragility of human existence. Though the seasons shift from winter to spring, she remains frozen in silence and solitude. This film is distributed by Houshyar Ghasimi.

An inverse screendance — the dancer doesn’t dance, the camera does.

A dance battle is a communal experience. Everyone and everything – from performing dancers to the audiences watching, from shadows cast to light shined – is a participant in the experience, unconsciously and consciously moving as one. At battles, we as attendees often only pay attention to the dancers at the center of the stage, but through an observational lens, Top 16 shares a loving look at all the individuals – both on and off stage – that comprise this beautiful whole. Forging an expansive new understanding of performance and participation, Top 16 centers often overlooked individuals within the street dance community and joyously honors this transcendent collective celebration that we call a dance battle.

A group of learning disabled and queer artists gather at Derek Jarman’s iconic home Prospect Cottage. Through poetry and dance they reflect on love, loss, nature, otherness and community, paying homage to the artist’s activist legacy and responding to the evocative landscape of Dungeness, with music by Derek Jarman’s collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, design by Tim Spooner and artists from Thick & Tight and Corali Dance Company.

Monkey & Dog: Coded Paws – Two pals cling tightly, hand in hand they stroll, One’s a wily monkey, one’s a tail-wagging soul. How to bond through thick and thin? When one sulks, the other grins — Secret codes only “we” control! Through foggy dawns or meteor showers, we charge through thorns, we sniff wildflowers. Let the world spin fast or slow…Our friendship’s a bold cartoon — Paw prints chasing paw prints — Where? Nobody knows!

Move aside, Wonder Woman. Drop the pretence, Doris Day. The film images that confine women to a “realistic” role as housewife, nag, babe, or bitch have defined us for too long. Especially because in early cinema, before narrative conventions were ironclad, there were so many more ways to behave. For decades, movies were made almost exclusively by men in Europe and the USA after 1925. So, the slapstick comediennes and cross-dressed cowgirls of early cinema, who were wild, powerful, rude, funny, and utterly out of male control, got forgotten, or worse, erased. Breaking Plates collaborates with the curators of “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” to bring them back into view. Breaking Plates puts early films on the screen and then we talk to the characters in them, re-animate their antics, emulate their mayhem moves. As we wear their clothes and battle their haywire machines, exploding gags, and eruptive bodies, we learn to wield humour as a weapon against the structures that contain us.

This whimsical group piece starts in a laundromat, then spins in unexpected directions. Inspired by Spanish visual artist Paco Pomet and directed by Marites Carino and choreography by Emmanuelle Lê Phan, OffSpin Cycle features Tentacle Tribe dancers and music from Tentacle Tribe’s cofounder, Elon Höglund. Mostly filmed on 16mm in Montréal, the short film explores the unimaginable possibilities that open outside of one’s comfort zone. The project received a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and was financed by the Conseil des Arts du Québec (Québec Art Council).

Close to the coast with the pirogues fishing canoes in Senegal, we are invited to a women’s sabar dance circle, a joyful exchange of teasing and pleasing audience with liberating moves to the rhythms of the drums. We see a drum lesson with children, drum making and market mingling with the renowned Senegalese Teranga, generosity in action. On washday, Babacar, the choreographer, and his dancers arrive to lead the girls through a Bara Mbaye, a song everybody knows. The well in another town brings up muddy water, but the dance goes on. It is a stabilizing force.