Directed by Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob • Documentary • With Carmen de Lavallade, Geoffrey Holder, Ailvin Ailey, Lester Horton, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker • 2006 • 80 minutes
Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, two living legends in the world of American dance, are the subjects of this intimate and revealing documentary. Carmen achieved notoriety in the early 1950s, as a lead dancer of incomparable beauty and grace with Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater. Geoffrey, large in life and an elemental force on stage, found fame not only as a dancer but also as an actor (Live and Let Die), soda spokesman (“the Un-Colaaaaa...”) and theater director (The Wiz). He and Carmen met in 1954 and married a year later.
Filmed over several years in the United States, Trinidad and Paris, this exquisite documentary features candid interviews and glorious dance performances, with legends like Alvin Ailey, Herbert Ross, Lester Horton, Joe Layton, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker, demonstrating the amazing talent and uninterrupted creativity of these icons of dance.
Up Next in Dance
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Secundaria
Directed by Mary Jane Doherty • Documentary • With Mayara Piñeiro, Gabriela Moreno, Moises Noriega • 2013 • 96 minutes
Secundaria quietly follows one high school class on its journey through Cuba's world-famous National Ballet School. The teens love to dance, but for many of them dance is also t...
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If The Dancer Dances
Directed by Maia Wechsler • Documentary • 2018 • 177 minutes
IF THE DANCER DANCES invites viewers into the intimate world of the dance studio. Stephen Petronio, one of today’s leading dance-makers, is determined to help his dancers breathe new life into RainForest (1968), an iconic work by the l...
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Momma Don't Allow (Karl Reisz & Tony ...
Directed by Karel Reisz & Tony Richardson • Documentary • With Chris Barber, Monty Sunshine, Pat Halcox, Ron Bowden • 1956 • 22 minutes
This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it ...
