That has been bothering me the whole time
What we’re being confronted with isn’t immediately obvious: We hear deep breathing and the rustle and fall of textiles covering a dancing body. The camera stays close to it, thereby abstracting the structures and patterns produced by the movement.
Contrasts between light and dark are a powerful formal aesthetic element and also anticipate the dramatic mood, which will come to a head in the course of the film.
Although solely fragments of the body can be discerned at first, the gestures, strides and sounds convey an awareness of the body we would expect of a martial-arts fighter.
As soon as the dancer (Silke Grabinger) is shown in full, all this reverses: The clothing can now be identified as a burka, the complex history of which charges each movement and gesture with political significance. As this is unable to limit the dancer’s physical expressiveness, she successfully resignifies it all, though normally, this piece of clothing’s hardly associated with women power.
As it obviously wasn’t Arash T. Riahi’s intention to gloss over reality, this almost optimistic image is soon followed by a radical rupture: In the next shot the dancer hangs in the air like a marionette, all her freedom of movement and any possibility of personal expression taken away.
Her motionlessness signals the end, though this isn’t the final image in this unusual dance film: In a figurative sense the filmmaker lets the curtain fall and shows in colorful images that what we have seen is “merely” the impressive result of an extremely experimental fusion of modern dance, political issues and physical liberation. (Christa Benzer)
The film can be seen as a utopian suggestion. What happens, if you let a woman in a Burka do a performance, which could never be allowed to show publicly. At the end the set up is getting brought back to reality. We don’t claim this to be a real woman in a Burka, it becomes clear, that this is only a representation. The dancer Silke Grabinger is a body, which interprets something and can never really constitute the fate of those women. (Arash T. Riahi)
That has been bothering me the whole time
2013
Austria
10 min