Andros in the City
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Naz Riahi
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A dancer marooned in his parents' Brooklyn brownstone after a cancelled Berlin show waits for a rare book dealer to arrive. He sits inside the slow collapse of his industry and his own hunger for an audience.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A pandemic-era piece that isn't about the pandemic — it's about being a body trained to be watched suddenly having nobody watching. That's a far more interesting framing than the usual lockdown navel-gaze.
A dancer's existential reckoning staged as a wait for a stranger in a brownstone is precisely the kind of hermetic chamber piece I'll always make time for, and Riahi clearly understands that a performer-in-stasis is its own form of choreography. The Cassavetes ache is the right reference.
A dancer waiting in a brownstone for a rare book dealer, with Nick Hallett scoring — this is the contained-interior-reckoning subgenre done with patience, and the cancelled-Berlin-show setup roots the ache in 2020-2021 dancer reality without naming it.