“The Cell,” a short dance film jointly produced by Taiwan choreographer and artistic director Tsai Po-cheng and emerging filmmaker Ho Meng-hsueh, will have its North American premiere Feb. 11 in New York City during the Dance on Camera Festival.
It will be screened at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the festival’s global shorts program alongside “Mother Melancholia” from Germany and “Transparent” from the U.K., the Ministry of Culture said.
The film is one of 30 shorts selected from over 290 submissions from 35 countries taking part in the 51st edition of the event. Co-presented by Dance Films Association and FLC since 1971, the annual festival is the longest-running event of its kind in the world, the organizers said.
According to the MOC, Tsai has produced several dance pieces since 2014 that have received international critical acclaim. He was named one of 2017/2018’s most promising young choreographers by a German magazine and the best emerging choreographer of 2020 by the France National Board of Performance Arts.
The MOC said the film was originally produced by Tsai in 2022 as his fifth full-length work. Tsai described it as a surreal piece on separation and dissociation that was inspired by the feelings of loneliness and social isolation prevalent during the pandemic.
Since all in-person performances were canceled as a result of COVID-19, Tsai and Ho decided to re-create the performance as a film through a special subsidy program launched by the MOC and Taiwan’s National Performing Arts Center. This format will allow the short to reach a wider audience, including many viewers who would not have been able to see the performance live, the MOC added.
In addition to the U.S. festival, the dance film has also been short-listed in film festivals in Berlin, Brussels, London, Rome and Tokyo. (SFC-E)
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