Aito Hine
2024 · 13m · French Polynesia
Directed by Krysten Resnick
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, sensual
A young woman's journey of discovery through French Polynesia, told through dance bound to land and ocean.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every travel-doc cliché in the book—young woman, exotic locale, spiritual awakening through dance—until you realize Resnick's actually interrogating the fantasy itself, using the body as both confession and resistance to the postcard version of Polynesia.
Resnick understands the lineage she's working in: the structuralist documentary tradition meets contemporary dance cinema, with an editing rhythm that mirrors the corporeal language rather than illustrating it—formally aware and historically situated.
The decision to let the dancer's breath be audible alongside the ocean—to privilege the body's labor over the landscape's beauty—is what transforms this from a gorgeous travel film into something that actually *means* something about presence and place.