Romance | Samantha Shay

Developed in close collaboration between director Samantha Shay and an intergenerational ensemble of dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal, the film centers on the company’s first transgender dancer, Naomi Brito, and how her transition was catalyzed by the roles of women as she experienced them in the Pina Bausch repertoire.

Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch’s iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio and inspired by the short story "It was Romance" by Miranda July, the film dances on the fault lines between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present and future; and through a fresh and powerful encounter, it assures that the power of an aging legacy is never ending.