South East European Film Festival

If you love beautiful things and you want to be moved, you must see PINA, the documentary by Wim Wenders.

It captures some of the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch’s 40 dances, using 3-D technology that draws you into the dance in a way that’s never been filmed before. And it’s earthy! Where else have you seen dancers ooze into actual dirt, fling themselves into water and rock, burst through woods in spring, or dance a lonely arabesque on a concrete island surrounded by traffic and overhead trains? And you’ve certainly never seen a Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring) this redolent of the pulsating, frightening yet mesmerizing biological power of human sexuality. Bausch was an utter original.   The backstory is almost as good as the film. Speaking recently to Jeremy Kagan after a screening recently at the Director’s Guild of America, Wenders noted that he and Bausch had tried to make a film for 20 years, but Wenders could never see how the theatricality and vigor of dance could be captured properly in film, until the advent of the 3-D camera. So in 2009, they succeeded in capturing four dances in performance and were planning the rest of the doc when Bausch died suddenly at the age of XX. He had four dances, but had lost the focus of his friend.   Wenders knew Bausch had developed her dances in collaboration with her dancers; she would pose a question about yearning, for example, and the dancer would respond not in words, but in movements that then became the basis of the images she created. Wenders persuaded the dancers to show him some of these seminal movements, and with these was able to create a portrait of the choreography, without the choreographer. Because he knew how much Bausch reveled working with elemental rock, water and soil, he realized the film could be opened by staging dance fragments outdoors. Since he also knew all the perfomers well, he knew which dancer would excel working on a dusty plateau above a quarry, and which should dance in an abandoned factory.   The resulting images create a starkly beautiful and moving portrait of a unique choreographer, made after she could no longer speak for herself. What a gift Wenders has given the world—and what a way to remember (or discover) Pina Bausch! – Deirdre