by Thinus Ferreira
A new film festival called the TRACE Movement Art Film Festival will have its inaugural 4-day event from 19 to 22 November at The Labia Theatre in Cape Town, focused on screendance and movement-based film.
Louise Coetzer and Oscar O'Ryan are the co-founders of the TRACE Movement Art Film Festival.
The new film festival is a partnership between Louise Coetzer and Oscar O'Ryan's Darkroom Contemporary, which they started in Cape Town in 2010, and Germany's POOL Movement Art Film Festival Berlin.
Sarah Möller and Wibke Janssen from POOL Movement Art Film Festival Berlin are partner curators.
The festival aims to provide a platform to showcase choreography, cinema and digital storytelling.
The TRACE Movement Art Film Festival will include artist talks and industry sessions, which will be held at The Labia Theatre and the Guga S'thebe Arts & Culture Centre in Langa around topics of interest to the screendance community.
The festival will include 22 selected shorts with work from countries including Germany, Hong Kong, Spain, Indonesia, Portugal, Tanzania, Lebanon, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the United States.
The TRACE Movement Art Film Festival will have the African premiere of the Iranian experimental dance film Flatland, created by Iranian filmmakers Houshyar Ghasimi and Alireza Keymanesh.
The line-up also includes Hadi Moussally's Abjad Ḥawaz named after the ancient ordering of the Arabic alphabet and which features each letter danced and embodied against the backdrop of Barcelona's ruins.
There is also Inhale, choreographed in response to Iran's 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, which is directed by Lagha Ghavam and Mohsen Pouryousefian.
Môre Môre Môre by Darion Adams is set within the Manenberg community of Cape Town.
"TRACE Movement Art Film Festival Africa grew from a shared curiosity about the many ways movement can be expressed through film," says Louise Coetzer and Oscar O'Ryan.
"Through our partnership with POOL Movement Art Film Festival Berlin, we are bringing together a diverse collection of works that reflect different cultural contexts, artistic approaches and ways of seeing the world."
The official poster for the first TRACE Movement Art Film Festival is a classic monochrome:
