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Anna Doesn't Want To Be Seen Dancing

Anna, an embarrassed teenager, tries to cope with her mother’s sudden and unexplainable urge to dance.

synopsis

It is the European Middle Ages. Anna’s mother is out in the street and, for no apparent reason, has started to dance. Anna feels deeply humiliated by her mother’s unexplainable behaviour. To make matters worse, her mother keeps dancing without stopping for several days, and eventually other people start joining her without giving any explanation. Mortified by embarrassment, Anna and other teenagers in the village try everything to distance themselves from the adult dancers; but the grown-ups seem determined to make fools of themselves, and to carry everything along with them: landscape, plants, animals, and social roles seem to turn ridiculous as well. Eventually the dancers, one by one, begin to die, in a kind of joyous, comfortable, self-affirming collective suicide. Only Anna remains. There is no one left to be embarrassed in front of. No one to be embarrassed for.

Director’statement

What happens if the structure that shapes a society stops fitting the society it is built for? This film explores the consequences of such a situation: what contradictions arise in the search of a common identity? What does it mean to be embarrassed for other people? How do we deal with the impossibility of controlling other people’s behaviour and the moral imperative to identify ourselves with them? Anna tries to preserve appearances. Unconsciously, she is trying to save a common image that can represent us all. Instead, she feels represented by her mother’s ridiculous behaviour. So the self and the other enter into the scene: the childish need of a daughter to control her mother’s image as if it were her own, is suddenly not so different from the relationship between colonizers and colonized in a post-colonial world – the ambition to find a common image seems at its heart impossible and misguided. At its core, the problem is a teenager’s deep question: where do I end, and where does the other begin?

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2019
Discover more details here:
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TFL Catalogue 2019

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