92Y presents the third annual 92Y Mobile Dance Film Festival — the only dance film festival featuring works shot entirely on mobile devices. The Festival explores what happens at the intersection of choreography, camerawork and editing.
An international jury of dance filmmakers chose 30 films as Official Selections out of more than 152 submissions from around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Uruguay and the US. The Official Selections include the Festival’s first-ever animated mobile dance film.
New to this year’s Festival is the 13 Quarantine Screen selections, a festival feature created in response to the pandemic conditions dancers and filmmakers faced. The submission period for this year’s Festival had been open when COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns began and out of necessity, filmmakers utilized social-distancing practices and techniques such as Zoom and FaceTime, Tik Tok’s Don’t Rush challenge, and split-screen dueting. MDFF creator Andrew Chapman realized it would be difficult to measure these films against the more “traditional” techniques available to pre-pandemic artists and created a separate category.
The Festival also includes a separate screening of the new documentary Bent But Not Broken starring dancers with scoliosis, shot on mobile devices during the pandemic. This is the first documentary for the Festival and is followed by a discussion with the film's director Paige Fraser, choreographer Rena Butler and MDFF creator Andrew Chapman.
