Source
2011 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Pepita Ferrari
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, sensual, theatrical
Dancer Margie Gillis performs in stark light, lifting her arms and tossing her long hair, as high-speed photography captures the delicate force and exuberance of a career spanning four decades.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dance film that actually earns its reverence—Ferrari refuses the usual virtuosity trap and instead lets high-speed photography do the subversive work, freezing the body into something almost sculptural and weird rather than pretty.
This is essay filmmaking at its most rigorous: a 40-year retrospective compressed into six minutes of sustained formal decision-making, where the choice to capture movement at high speed becomes the film's entire argument about presence, decay, and artistic endurance.
The high-speed photography is the film's singular stroke—it transforms documentary footage of a dancer into something that feels suspended and alien, making every hair toss and arm lift into a statement about time that a conventional shoot could never reach.