Dance Camera West 2021

Dance Camera West 2021

OVID is proud to present the entirety of this year's Dance Camera West Festival. This selection of films ranges from full-length documentaries to experimental shorts. Dance Camera West aims to foster groundbreaking talent and to encourage new work in the area of dance film by supporting creation, presentation and distribution of films. DCW presents an annual international festival held at renowned arts venues throughout Los Angeles, as well as informative and educational events throughout the year in person and virtually, to bring dance beyond the stage through the language of film. Enjoy!

Check out DCW 2022's festival here.

Dance Camera West 2021
  • Best of Fest 1 - Sedimented Here

    Directed by Rachel Barker • Experimental Short • 2021 • 6 minutes

    This dance film shot in Moab, Utah explores relationship between the moving body and outdoor environment, asking "what movement belongs here"? How are our bodies and physical histories connected to the landscapes that resonate wit...

  • Best of Fest 1 - Traces

    Directed by Alex Murrull • Experimental Short • 2021 • 10 minutes

    Two strangers share a room for hours in different shifts. Their loneliness is broken as they both find each other’s objects. A relationship that inhabits between fantasy and reality emerges.

  • Best of Fest 1 - 4

    Directed by Mariana Palacios • Documentary • 2021 • 12 minutes

    4 is an experimental short film featuring music & dance that brings the audience to a research space to identify the source of balance and proportions in the combined art forms. Two pianists and two dancers travel together in a retro...

  • Best of Fest 1 - Earth Odyssey: Asaf Avidan

    Directed by Adi Halfin • Documentary • 2021 • 4 minutes

    Earth Odyssey was made by dancers from different continents filming themselves in their confinement with their personal phones and computers. It was made in the first week of April 2020 while almost 2 billion people around the globe were un...

  • Best of Fest 1 - Beast

    Directed by Henrique Pina • Documentary • 2021 • 10 minutes

    "Beast" portrays an encounter between the choreographer Victor Hugo Pontes and Braga Municipal Stadium, by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Order and disorder. Men and beasts in flocks. Wild conquest among mute roars. Concrete and ...

  • Best of Fest 1 - Liminality

    Directed by Jennifer Petuch & Annali Rose • Documentary • 2021 • 7 minutes

    Liminality is inspired by reimagining what Odette may have experienced upon plunging to her death in the lake from the classical ballet "Swan Lake". It is a moment of suspended reality and a story of disenchantment, self-...

  • Best of Fest 1 - where the spiders live

    Directed by Holger Mohaupt • Experimental Short • 2021 • 3 minutes

    A physical response to the memory of architecture set in the ruins of an abandoned paintball arena in Scotland.

  • Best of Fest 1 - Escape

    Directed by Heidi Duckler • Documentary • 2021 • 13 minutes

    In November 2019 Heidi Duckler Dance performed as part of the international programming at the Centro de Experimentación Escénica in Valdivia and at the LOFT International Dance Festival in Concepción, Chile. The company arrived at a ti...

  • Best of Fest 2 - Dusk

    Directed by Henrique Pina • Experimental Short • 2021 • 8 minutes

    "Dusk" portrays an encounter between the choreographer Olga Roriz and Mudas – Contemporary Art Museum, in Madeira island, by the architect Paulo David. Horizon. Sea. Sky. Rock over the sea. A spiralling run from an interior to an ...

  • Best of Fest 2 - ID

    Directed by Cass Mortimer Eipper • Experimental Short • 2021 • 6 minutes

    ‘Id’ follows six dancers in communion, each driven by their own instinctive impulses which manifest fast and slow. Propelled like machines through dispositions and space, oscillations of awareness illuminate shared conflict...

  • Best of Fest 2 - Forest Floor

    Directed by Robbie Synge • Experimental Short • 2021 • 5 minutes

    Shot in Abernethy Forest in The Cairngorms, “Forest Floor” considers different bodies and physical access challenges in a rural location. Close friends Julie and Robbie sit quietly together on the ground, a simple idea requiring a ...

  • Best of Fest 2 - Second Seed

    Directed by Baye & Asa • Experimental Short • 2021 • 16 minutes

    Second Seed is a dance horror film responding to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Griffith's film is a veneration of the KKK, painting the Klan as saviors of a white race in danger as American culture and politics begin to shi...

  • Best of Fest 2 - Lost Horse: Asaf Avidan

    Directed by Adi Halfin • Experimental Short • 2021 • 3 minutes

    Armed with their own camera, modern dance power-couple Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber set about documenting their intimate daily lives in a new genre of “Musical” style documentary.

  • Best of Fest 2 - The King

    Directed by Jonathan Redavid • Experimental Short • 2021 • 4 minutes

    "A Tribute to The King of Rock’n Roll."

  • Best of Fest 2 - Being

    Directed by Pablo Destito • Experimental Short • 2021 • 7 minutes

    Being captures the restorative power that draws the dancer to the dance. Away from a life of sidewalks and cellphones, where beauty is unnoticed, time stops so it may start again. The dance restores the self, and the senses reconn...

  • Best of Fest 2 - The Circadian Cycle

    Directed by Garry Stewart • Experimental Short • 2021 • 16 minutes

    The Circadian Cycle is a short film conceived and directed by Garry Stewart, with cinematography from renowned director and film maker Cordelia Beresford. Filmed within the stunning South Australian landscape, The Circadian Cycle...

  • Outstanding Award Winner Henrique Pina: Body-Buildings

    Directed by Henrique Pina • Documentary • 2021 • 50 minutes

    Outstanding Achievement Award-Winning Film!

    BODY-BUILDINGS brings together dance, architecture and cinema, merging identities and concepts. Six choreographies — by Tânia Carvalho; Vera Mantero; Victor Hugo Pontes; Jonas & Lander; Olga ...

  • Documentary - All It Gives

    Directed by Talia Woodland • Documentary • 2021 • 15 minutes

    Showcasing one of Toronto’s best up and coming Hiphop dancing stars, All It Gives follows the story of Kosi Eze, a Nigerian immigrant who moved to Canada when she was 14. Her transition to the country brought immense culture shock, lon...

  • Documentary - Chen

    Directed by Orit Novak • Documentary • 2021 • 21 minutes

    ‘CHEN’ tells the story of Chinese Australian dancer Chengwu Guo (Chen), who at the age of 10 was thrown into the strict and rigorous training world of the Beijing Dance Academy. Whilst enduring long periods of time away from his family and...

  • L'AMOUR! - Avoidance

    Directed by Matthew McKee • Documentary • 2021 • 6 minutes

    A short dance film inspired by themes of loss and conflict.

  • L'AMOUR! - Dignity

    Directed by Alayna Jennings • Documentary • 2021 • 3 minutes

    Domestic Violence has an extensive and painful impact. Nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States alone. On any given day there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic viol...

  • L'AMOUR! - Duet Alanda

    Directed by Marcat Dance & Mario Bermudez Gil • Documentary • 2021 • 10 minutes

    A stage piece.

  • L'AMOUR! - Hors

    Directed by Amélie Gagnon, Julia-Maude Cloutier • Documentary • 2021 • 6 minutes

    It is carried by a reflection on the interior and exterior places. Two women-landscapes merge into one another and transpose themselves into distinct places, from winter landscapes to squeaky uninhabited places, in ...

  • L'AMOUR! - Lazarus

    Directed by Tuixén Benet • Documentary • 2021 • 8 minutes

    Through a dialogue between movement and landscape, Lazarus reflects on the objectification of the woman body in film. The famous quote by Edgar Allan Poe "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the w...