My film Otherworldly: Dancing in the Deep about the underwater dance practice of Gabriel Forestieri (aka: ProjectLIMB) premiered in San Francisco this October at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Getting to do an audience Q&A was my favorite part - the feedback of what people thought, what questions they had. Creating can be a lonely process, and sharing my work with the world is incredibly gratifying.
One thing I didn’t think about was that everyone assumed the film was shot while scuba diving. I’ve only scuba dived once in my life and didn’t like it. Everything in this film was shot on breathhold, and this was my first time really freediving. So of course I have to make it more complicated by also filming while I’m doing it!
You can't get certain shots while scuba diving because you're not able to easily change levels in the ocean. You can’t go down and up to the surface all in one go, because of nitrogen build up in the blood. You have to make "decompression stops" as you ascend. So to film underwater, you have to hang out at one level in the water - and I wanted shots that followed the dancers from the surface, down to ~30 feet, and then coming up again to the surface. Because the practice of dancing underwater is allowing the buoyancy to bring them up, I needed to be more free in the water while filming. And so I held my breath. Some of these shots are almost 2 minutes long.
If you’d like to see the film you can now stream it online as part of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival or come to the East Coast Premiere Sunday October 26 at 11AM in Harvard Square as part of the Globe Docs Film Festival.
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