A Drifting Up
2022 · 10m · United Kingdom
Directed by Jacob Lee
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
London artist Jacob Lee films himself dancing through London and Bristol for six weeks while coming off antidepressants — a joyous, deeply personal dance film about solidarity and recovery.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A dance film about psychiatric recovery sounds like the kind of earnest wellness content that makes me roll my eyes—except Lee commits to the bit so fully, moving through actual streets with such unselfconscious joy, that it becomes genuinely subversive; he's weaponized sincerity against itself.
There's a lineage here worth noting—the body-as-archive tradition of Forsythe, the urban intervention ethics of Cunningham—but what interests me more is how Lee's six-week durational choice quietly displaces the short film's usual compression; the form itself becomes the argument.
The masterstroke is shooting in real time across two cities without a score until the movement itself becomes the rhythm—that decision to let the body speak first, London's indifference as the only soundtrack, is what transforms a personal document into something that lands.
Reviews
His BAFTA-nominated short film about those six weeks is powerfully joyous; it shows dance both as a tool of solidarity and a means of strengthening one's sense-of-self in the face of mental hardship.