OuDance Festival

Dance Film Screening I – Pathways, rooftops, streets, homes – Sun 13.9.2026 at 13

Inhale – Lagha Ghavam & Mohsen Pouryousefian

Until – Tanin Torabi

Flatland – Alireza Keymanesh & Amir Pousti

In the Middle – Saba Khatamy

The screening brings together four short films made by contemporary Iranian dance filmmakers. In their unique artistic ways, each film unravels entanglements between public and private, free and restricted, expressed and muted. All the films have been filmed in the capital city of Iran, Tehran between the years of 2017 – 2025. In the films the urban landscape functions as a crucial character instead of simply a backdrop.

The screening includes an introduction to the filmmakers, the films and their context.

To get yourself ready for the screening, you can read an article on Tanin Torabi’s filmmaking written by the screening’s curator Silja Tuovinen. The interview was made in 2024 in collaboration with POOL – MOVEMENT ART FILM Festival Berlin.

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The screening is curated by Silja Tuovinen, whom JoJo – Oulu Dance Center has invited to select films next to her own dance film Avalanche.

THE FILMS AT THE SCREENING:

Inhale – Lagha Ghavam & Mohsen Pouryousefian

A young woman is trapped in emotional limbo after years of social suppression in her society. She is suspended in stillness as life echoes faintly around her. Distant explosions punctuate her isolation, and every attempt to move forward is disrupted by external forces. As she gradually dissolves into nature, the film meditates on the fragility of human existence. Though the seasons shift from winter to spring, she remains frozen in silence and solitude.

Until – Tanin Torabi

“Until…” is a single-take video, captured using only the switch between the front and back cameras of an iPhone by the performers, and filmed during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” protests in Tehran, Iran. The video not only presents a highly intricate choreography for the camera, infused with the originality and urgency of what is deemed ‘possible’ in that specific situation, but also encapsulates the essence of unity, resilience, and purposefulness demonstrated by young artists responding creatively and courageously to an actual brutal situation in Iran.

Flatland – Alireza Keymanesh & Amir Pousti

Flatland has been made based on a book of the same name written by Edwin Abbott in 1884. The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures. The narrator is a square named A Square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions.

In the Middle – Saba Khatamy

In the Middle is a short dance film captured in the streets of Tehran and London, exploring the emotional experience of living between two worlds. In Tehran, where dance is prohibited, movement becomes an act of resistance, a gesture of freedom within restriction. In London, dance is free, but this freedom can feel anonymous and isolating.

The film traces a dialogue between the body and two cities, capturing how the body navigates urban spaces while reflecting the tension between belonging and dislocation. Through shifting cityscapes and movement, In the Middle explores the internal push and pull of being caught between past and present, home and elsewhere. It is a personal reflection on what it means to exist “in between,” where nothing fully fits and everything leaves a mark.

Dance Film Screening II – Borderland between dreams and nightmares – Sun 13.9.2026 at 14.30

Österlen – Tori Lawrence (US)

Limbes – Karl Cannone (FR)

Voragine – Dehors Audela (Salvatore Insana & Elisa Turco Liveri) (IT)

Kerron ihmisestä, kerron kalliosta – Ida Remsu (FI)

Avalanche – Silja Tuovinen (FI)

The screening brings together short films that carry ambiguous atmospheres, in which it can be challenging to recognise whether one is embedded in a dream, a nightmare or their direct borderland. All the films use natural sites such as fields, shores, rocks and fissures as liminal sites between lived, imagined and dreamt realities.

The screening includes introduction to the filmmakers, the films and their context. The screening also hosts elements of a relaxed screening as much as the film studio allows. Among others changing positions, stretching and moving the body is welcome.

To get yourself ready for the screening, you can read an article on Tori Lawrence’s filmmaking practice written by the screening’s curator Silja Tuovinen. The interview is made in 2024 in collaboration with POOL – MOVEMENT ART FILM Festival Berlin.

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The screening is curated by Silja Tuovinen, whom JoJo – Oulu Dance Center has invited to select films next to her own dance film Avalanche.

THE FILMS AT THE SCREENING:

Österlen – Tori Lawrence (US)

Set in rural southern Sweden, the short black and white film is a meditation on the solitary journey of two characters as they gradually become absorbed back into the land.

LIMBES – Karl Cannone (FR)

LIMBES is an expressionist dance film that opens a window into the dreams and nightmares of a sleeping body. Between paralysis and release, it explores collective fears and traumas and suggests the fragile paths toward healing.

Voragine – Dehors Audela (Salvatore Insana & Elisa Turco Liveri) (IT)

There is a deep fissure in the center of that hill. A warning, a sign, a cut orchestrated by the elements.

A wound to inhabit. A fracture to explore.

An opening of the ground: something has broken, the surface of the earth is scarred. and we lie in the belly of catastrophe. Dreaming of arcadia and then resoundingly finding it again, between the chasms of the earth and those of the imaginary.

A threshold: a space-time in which we can happen to end up inside it. Like inside a dream or like inside a fissure of the earth: facing the landslide or inside it, symbiotically, in an attempt to become one, human body and natural environment, interpenetrating.

A chasm breaks the rhythm of the walk and that of the gaze, just as montage wounds the continuity of vision. We live in discontinuity, in the rupture of spatial and temporal continuity. We are made of fragments fractured, interrupted, crumbling, eroded by water. How can we still feel connected to the land that hosts us? How can we still feel inside a disappearing image?

Kerron ihmisestä, kerron kalliosta – Ida Remsu (FI)

Kerron ihmisestä, kerron kalliosta is a Butoh dance film directed by Ida Remsu, in which dancers Petri Järvinen and Ida Remsu explore the connection, and the differences, between humanity and the ground of the earth. Butoh expression is characterized by improvisation and the dancer’s internal transformation rather than traditional storytelling. In this short dance film, movement is likewise built around these elements and the question: “Where do I begin, and where do I end?”

Avalanche – Silja Tuovinen (FI)

Haunting dance film Avalanche draws inspiration from a climate change scenario where the northern part of the world heats up and suffers a loss of snowy winters. The one-take film Avalanche traces emotional textures triggered by climate collapse, in a world where snow is history. Avalanche places gaze specifically on how massive environmental loss and climate grief can impact human psyche and disturb the bodily experience of the world. At the heart of the film is the main characters’ crackling sanity and fragile, fumbling bodies. Snow is merely a mirage that, however, creates a real sense of both comfort and distress.

In collaboration with