2017 AWARD WINNERS

Awards for the 8th annual San Francisco Dance Film Festival, chosen by a group of independent jury members, were announced at the end of the closing night program. Awards were given to the following films:

Best Documentary

Rebels on Pointe

(Canada, 2017) 90 min
Director: Bobbi Jo Hart

Exploring universal themes of identity, dreams, family, loss and love, Rebels on Pointe is the first-ever documentary film celebrating the world famous Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.

HONORABLE MENTION
Dance For Life
(Canada, 2016) 4:00
Director: Ella Cooper

Short dance film meets documentary that features a once-impoverished minor-league soccer player from Mozambique, who gives up everything to pursue a life of dance in Canada.

Best Live Performance Capture

A Swan Lake

(Norway, 2014) 98 min
Director: Jeff Tudor
Choreographer: Alexander Ekman

Alexander Ekman’s witty, inventive and powerful take on the most famous ballet of all. Recorded at Norwegian National Ballet.

Best Art/Experimental

Womb

(Switzerland, 2016) 32:00
Director: Gilles Jobin
Choreographer: Gilles Jobin

Womb is a 3D short film which marries stereoscopic images, dance, visual art and music. It is an existential tracking shot, an abstract analogy of life’s journey that draws on the depth of space and the volume of bodies to trigger a contemplative and emotional response.

Best Screendance Short Over 10 Min

And So Do I

(Lebanon, 2016) 13:00
Director: Jana G. Younes
Choreographer: Jens Bjerregaard

A man lost his wife while she was giving birth to his little girl. The trauma, even after 10 years, still causes him hallucinations. In his own bubble, he imagines his wife is still with him.

HONORABLE MENTION
SAMT (silence)
(Lebanon, 2016) 15:00
Director: Aoun Chadi
Choreographer: Aoun Chadi

In a fanatic dictatorship, modern dance is the secret code of the silent resistance. At out-of-the-way places in town young people celebrate the hidden joy of life with their bodies, cope with the terror they experienced. SAMT, is the introduction of a dysfunctional society that is about to implode.

Best Screendance Short Under 10 Min

Jonah

(United States, 2016) 5:23
Director: Andrew Michael Ellis
Choreographer: Ernest Felton Baker

An interview with a former African-American slave accompanies a powerful dance vignette of an urban man in extremis. The juxtaposition of past and present raises questions about inherited trauma and the possibility of regeneration.

Best Screendance Short Under 5 Min – Dual Winners

Ceiling

(United States, 2016) 3:53
Director: Katherine Helen Fisher
Choreographer: Katherine Helen Fisher
View Trailer

Ceiling focuses on a dancer’s repetitive leap as a physical allegory for striving. Shot in the Angeles Forest on the Phantom Camera, the film weaves gender and landscape into the body’s potential for movement in the tradition of Eadweard Muybridge.
 

Take Your Time

(United States, 2017) 4:49
Director: Max Sachar, Natasha Adorlee Johnson
Choreographer: Natasha Adorlee Johnson
View Trailer

Take Your Time is a raw and powerful performance-art piece that explores the concept of time & relationships by following a duet as they navigate complex obstacles and spaces.

Best Student Film

Dance to the Music in your Heart

(United States, 2017) 7:50
Director: Qiying Lin
Choreographer: Antoine Hunter, Ellen S Chang

How can a deaf person dance? Dance to the music in your heart.