Let This Feeling Go

The scouts

65mm for a six-minute dance catharsis feels like weaponized sincerity—the kind of formal excess that usually makes me want to walk out, except De Zen's actually earned it by refusing the expected emotional arc and just *sitting* in the feeling instead of resolving it.

The choice to shoot intimate emotional release on large-format film positions this squarely in the lineage of structural cinema meeting lyrical abstraction—De Zen understands that scale and restraint are dialogue partners, and the technical rigor here anchors what could've been treacly into something formally necessary.

What makes this work is the decision to let Nina Simone's voice do the argument—the body responds to the *grain* of that performance rather than the cinematography trying to outshout it, which is exactly the kind of restraint that costs nothing but changes everything.

Reviews

His latest short Let This Feeling Go is another example of this, an experimental dance short about a young woman who is primed to explode after she bottles up her emotions. With the film now online, DN caught up with De Zen once again to learn about the journey he went on with Let This Feeling Go, the decision to capture the film on large format 65mm film, and his inherent desire to steer away from the explicit and towards the abstract.

The piece, centred around Nina Simone's iconic song 'Sinnerman,' is a visual and auditory masterpiece shot on Kodak 65mm film, one of the few short films to have ever done so. The result is a cacophony of rich imagery and fluctuating music that collides in a powerful crescendo.

Festivals

• HollyShorts Film Festival, World Premiere