Tracing the Memory

Dancing Alone

Director: Biene Pilavcı
Germany, 2012, 98', color
Danish with Turkish subtitles

This sweeping visual investigation was prompted by the question, "After many years of hatred and extreme violence in our family, can my four siblings and I manage to forge sound relationships with other people, even though our parents and their parents before them were unable to?" Biene Pilavci deftly manoeuvres between the cliffs of contradictory certainties in her film. On the one hand there is the burden of the family we are born into and whose weight we are forced to carry, on the other hand there is the freedom to make decisions for oneself (or others), not resigned to fate but following one's own inner compass. The longer you watch it, the more it seems as if "Dancing Alone" wasn't planned at all but more or less happened to all those involved -- an open-ended experiment. "I doubt whether this is a good thing", says the director, "but I guess it had to happen."