Florence
2018 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Thibaut Duverneix, Mathieu Léger
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Quebec contemporary dancers Simon Ampleman, Daina Ashbee, Marie Claire Forté, Margie Gillis, Benoît Lachambre, and Andrew Tay improvise in honour of Florence Junca Adenot. Their powerful, poetic performances try to capture her vitality and life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-faced eulogy dance film sounds like the kind of institutional piety I'd normally run from, but Duverneix and Léger let the improvisation breathe in ways that actually undermine the memorial pieties—there's discomfort underneath the tenderness that sneaks up on you.
This sits firmly in the essay-film tradition of using dance as philosophical inquiry rather than spectacle, with the formal restraint to let six improvisers' responses to absence accumulate into something genuinely elegiac—the kind of precise emotional architecture that emerges from constraint.
The real choice here is the silence between bodies—letting improvisation breathe without scoring it sentimentally is the decision that transforms what could've been a ceremony film into something that actually honors how memory moves through a room.