Well, it's that time of year again. I've officially started watching shorts for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. As I dive into this year's batch (looks like my colleagues and I could get up to 7,000 short submissions!) it's really helpful to look back at films that I loved in previous years. Not only does this give me hope, but it also reminds me of how short filmmakers are always finding new ways to tell stories.
That's certainly the case with today's short FLOW, which manages to incorporate modern choreography into the dramatic arc of its main character without resorting to big production numbers or a climatic dance-off. The fact that it does all this while presenting an honest and fresh look at a person struggling with mental illness is even more impressive, as that's a classic short film cliche.
The director Christina Choe is no stranger to finding quirky takes on familiar material. Her previous film "The Queen", about a teenager working at his parents dry cleaning shop while dreaming of going to the prom, played to great acclaim at Frameline in 2010.
Watch FLOW and then check out my Q&A with Choe, below. (Rhyme times!)
The Bay Citizen: What was your inspiration for this story?
Christina Choe: I have been involved in the dance world for about a decade now, and in the past have collaborated with dance theater artists designing video for them, including a gig with a hip hop dance version of Romeo and Juliet. I´ve also been taking Senegalese dance classes for years, and have been a lover of dance for a long time.
As a filmmaker, I wanted to make a dance film as a sort of rebuttal to the mainstream dance movies. I´ve always been disappointed with most of the dance films recently, particularly the hip hop ones that have come out of Hollywood, like "Step it Up", "Stomp the Yard", etc. They usually [feature] terribly written storylines and bad acting that you´re just supposed to accept because the audience is just waiting for the inevitable dance battle at the end, which I felt never really captured the real b-boy battles that I had experienced.
So, the inspiration for FLOW mostly came from my desire to make a dance film, where the dance would be motivated by character and story. I think it was also inspired from working with my dance theater friends whose work is more conceptual and thematic than just pure dance technique.
TBC: This film builds its world very carefully. Did you always imagine it would have this look?
CC: Well, I had initially written the story for a specific dancer who incorporates his disability with his dance, but when the dancer couldn't do the project, I realized that I had to modify the script, which meant that I would shoot most of it in my apartment.
I think this is where the connection between OCD ritualistic behavior and dancing came to fruition. I had done some research about the different kinds of things that people do when they have OCD—like obsession with cleaning, numbers, closing doors, turning off things, etc,—and saw that some of these mundane rituals could be turned into a pedestrian, more conceptual type dance. I also knew that the voiceover would be an important part of it because we needed to get inside her head, and see what it was like to be suffocated by her rituals.
I also had made the decision early on that the final dance number would be shot in a lot of wide shots, because it drives me crazy when you watch a dance movie and it´s all close up shots handheld and you don't see the full body. Maybe it´s from doing dance theater, that I have that desire to see the whole body dancing.
TBC: Who is the lead actress? Is it difficult to 'direct' dance, as opposed to acting?
CC: The lead actress is Marla Phelan, a dancer who graduated from Julliard and had never acted in a film before (she´s now in the hit production "Sleep No More"). I had first tried to cast actors who had dance experience but quickly discovered that most of them could either only act or only dance, and very rarely could they do both exceptionally well. I knew I wanted someone that could DANCE.
So I ended up calling in dancers who I thought could carry the role as an actor.
It´s funny, that I seem to fall into this pattern of writing very specific characters that are difficult to cast, so I usually end up casting a non-actor in every film I've done so far. Marla came into the audition, and I had her do a bunch of OCD rituals, like arranging magazines, or sweeping the floor, and even though she had no experience as an actor I found her to be compelling to watch. And when she did a dance number to a Coco Rosie song, I just knew she had something. It also helped that she was also influenced by some of my favorite dance companies and choreographers like Ron Brown, Batsheva Dance Company, Pina Bausch, and the underground hip hop dancers from YazFilms (YouTube).
I actually found directing the dance to be the most fun ever and in some ways more freeing than directing actors. I felt like I was using a different part of my brain. Though I wasn´t choreographing it per se, I had creative input in the movement that was created and Marla did a combination of freestyle dancing and choregraphed movement to the music. Anyways, I´d love to make a dance feature someday that stands on its own as a movie!
Cilia Jimenez
are you serious? is it really ok to rip the entire score from a successful indie feature film?