Hormonal
2023 · 23m · Netherlands
Directed by Pien van Grinsven
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
A dance-driven documentary in which performer Bodine Sutorius embodies the testimonies of women about the invisible side effects of hormonal birth control.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a documentary that refuses to stay put—part testimony, part movement, entirely unwilling to let the invisible remain invisible—but the form occasionally feels like it's doing the heavy lifting that the voices themselves could carry.
The marriage of somatic practice to oral history sits in a lineage worth examining, and van Grinsven's restraint in not over-choreographing the testimonies shows real curatorial discipline, even if the conceptual apparatus occasionally outweighs the particularity of individual experience.
Bodine's body becomes a translation device for something normally locked in the interior—but it's the decision to let her stillness and micro-shifts do the talking, rather than turn the movement into spectacle, that transforms what could've been a well-meaning PSA into something genuinely felt.