Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, SansSouciFest.org

Sans Souci Virtual Screenings 2025
a series of screenings on our new website
Fall 2025
We’re delighted to once again be able to offer online screening options for those who may not want or be able to attend in-person events. These films will become available on this page during the screening window, free of charge for the public around the world, except where noted otherwise (some films may be geographically restricted).

If you love what you see, join us for this year's premiere, Labor Day weekend 2025, at The Museum of Boulder, or at the Dairy Art Center's Boedecker Cinema for an in-person screening!

Connecting Continents - available Sept 15 - Oct 15

Naan, 2023, Spain, 3 min

Directed by Cristina Candela
Choreography and Dancing by Cristina Candela
Between video and animation, "Naan" is a dreamlike creation on the dancer's body.

Convivencia, 2025, United States, 7 min

Directed by John Jota Leaños, Vanessa Sanchez
Produced by Hector Zavala
Choreography by Vanessa Sanchez
Featuring La Mezcla
Dancing by Vanessa Sanchez, Sandy Vazquez, Diana Arbuto, Micah Sallid, Kirsten Millan
Cinematography by Harry Gregory
Audio Engineering by Greg Landau
"Convivencia" brings to light the lives and stories of female essential laborers along the US/Mexico borderlands through Tap dance, Son Jarocho, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The film highlights interviews with migrant domestic laborers from La Colectiva de Mujeres, a female-led collective of domestic workers in California. The film addresses the struggles, resistance, and resilience of these women to showcase their significant contributions to our communities and celebrates their spirit of community, joy, and resilience. “Convivencia” is a unique fusion of oral histories, percussive dance, footwork, and folkloric dance from choreographer/director Vanessa Sanchez in collaboration with filmmaker John Jota Leaños.

Compost, 2025, Mexico, United States, 5 min

Directed by Ana Baer, Rocio Luna
Choreography by Rocio Luna
Featuring Alebrije
A site-specific screendance work inspired by Donna Haraway's Regenerative Politics for living together in a multi-species world.

Les Caminantes, 2024, Peru, 5 min

Produced and Directed by Ari Vidal
Dancing by Hanah Mulan, Cobra Mulan, Gala Mulan, Lui G Calloway, Koji Calloway, Bella Calloway, Prisma Calloway, Mati Calloway, Basu 007, Gigi Kameleon, Romario Kameleon, Namora Kameleon, Nathan Kameleon, Mitch 007, Nicol 007
"Les Caminantes" journeys into a poetic exploration of identity and belonging in the emerging peruvian ballroom kiki scene. Director Wachafo approaches the community's cultural expressions through its body language as a form of resistance against Peru's conservative society.

Airaferma, 2022, Spain, 7 min

Directed by Asun Noales, Federica Fasano, Germán Antón
Produced by OtraDanza Dance Company
Choreography by Asun Noales
Featuring OtraDanza Dance Company
An island is more than land and sea—it has a soul, a presence, a living face that shifts with time and movement. "Airaferma" is an immersive audiovisual journey, written and directed by Asun Noales and Federica Fasano, that seeks to capture the essence of Tabarca through the language of dance. With the island as both stage and inspiration, filmmaker Germán Antón weaves a dreamlike narrative where the body of the land and the bodies of the artists become one. Music, movement, theater, photography, and videography merge, giving rise to a singular, ever-changing expression—wild, fluid, and deeply human. Created during the first Residencia Petricor, supported by the Instituto Alicantino de Cultura Juan Gil Albert and the Diputación de Alicante.

Carmen, 2025, Spain, United Kingdom, 5 min

Produced and Directed by Andrew Margetson
Choreography by Carmen Aviles
Featuring Carmen Aviles
A young woman, dressed in a tracksuit, walks through the backstreets of Sevilla into a housing project. This is Carmen Aviles - the young street superstar of flamenco.

The Alchemist's Dance, 2024, Spain, 84 min

Directed by Arantxa Vela
Produced by Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España
Choreography by María Pagés
Featuring María Pagés Dance Company
How does María Pagés’ thinking work? Where do her movements come from? What inspires her dancing? Starting with the staging of one of her latest shows, ‘De Scheherezade,’ at the Roman Theatre of Mérida, we delve into her creative process, a process that she has shared for more than ten years with the poet, writer, and dramaturg El Arbi El Harti. Both helps us to deconstruct scenes and draw a line that links with their previous works. By means of a fine sense of humor, the couple reveals to us the happiness and difficulties of living and working together. María Pagés shows herself to us as a woman whose life has its center on stage, in her way of understanding flamenco. Her dance seems to be something close to meditation and her creative process, a kind of trance.

Shifting the Perspective - available Oct 16 - Nov 16

Soul Shelter, 2025, Slovakia, 4 min

Directed by Juraj Mráz
Produced by Juraj Mráz, Barbora Bakošová
Choreography by Kristína Martanovičová
Beneath the war-ravaged streets of Ukraine, a woman exists in an underground bomb shelter—a space that is both refuge and purgatory. Within these cold, breathing walls, time folds in on itself, revealing the unbroken cycle of war. She is not merely hiding; she is witnessing. Through echoes in the shelter—whispers of the past, fragments of the present, and the shadow of the future—she lives the stories of those who came before her. A child is born, only to be handed a rifle. The shelter absorbs these voices, transforming them into an eerie chorus of remembrance and inevitability. As she navigates this liminal space, she begins to see herself not as an individual but as part of a larger mechanism—a machine that recycles life into war, soldiers into ghosts. Her own body is both creator and casualty, her existence reduced to the paradox of giving life only for it to be taken away. As explosions rumble above, she is left with one question: Is escape possible, or is war the only inheritance? In the shelter, everything begins, and everything ends.

Inhale, 2025, Iran, 7 min

Directed by Lagha Ghavam, Mohsen Pouryousefian
Produced by Mohsen Pouryousefian
Choreography by Lagha Ghavam
Featuring Lagha Ghavam
A young woman is trapped in emotional limbo after the suppression of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran. Suspended in stillness as life echoes faintly around her. Distant explosions punctuate her isolation, and each attempt to move forward is disrupted by external forces. As she dissolves into nature, the film meditates on the fragility of human existence. Though seasons shift from winter to spring, she remains frozen in silence and solitude.

Dance for Camera, 2024, United States, 2 min

Directed by Mitchell Rose
Choreography by camera choreography by Mitchell Rose
Dancing by Douglas Dunn
Description coming soon.

Top 16, 2024, United States, 13 min

Directed by Brian Lu
Cinematography by Chris O'Malley
Color Grading by Laurie Little
A dance battle is a communal experience. Everyone and everything – from performing dancers to the audiences watching, from shadows cast to light shined – is a participant in the experience, unconsciously and consciously moving as one. At battles, we as attendees often only pay attention to the dancers at the center of the stage, but through an observational lens, “Top 16” shares a loving look at all the individuals – both on and off stage – that comprise this beautiful whole. Forging an expansive new understanding of performance and participation, “Top 16” centers often overlooked individuals within the street dance community and joyously honors this transcendent collective celebration that we call a dance battle.

Weathered Blue, 2025, United Kingdom, 15 min

Produced and Directed by Daniel Hay-Gordon, El Perry
Choreography by Daniel Hay Gordon and El Perry (Thick & Tight)
Featuring Thick & Tight
Dancing by Veneshia Bailey, Paul Davidson, Housni (DJ) Hassan, Daniel Hay-Gordon, Sheri King, El Perry, Jackie Ryan, Danny Smith
Music Composed by Simon Fisher Turner
Edited by Daniel Hay-Gordon, El Perry
Director of Photography by Courtney Nettleford
Production & Costume Design by Tim Spooner
A group of learning disabled and queer artists gather at Derek Jarman’s iconic home Prospect Cottage. Through poetry and dance they reflect on love, loss, nature, otherness and community, paying homage to the artist’s activist legacy and responding to the evocative landscape of Dungeness, with music by Derek Jarman’s collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, design by Tim Spooner and artists from Thick & Tight and Corali Dance Company.

Well!, 2024, China, 6 min

Produced and Directed by Lu Zhang
Choreography by Lu Zhang
Dancing by Zhaohan Yan, Lu Zhang
Cinematography by Sudong Liang
Stage Management by Dinghao Ma
Special Thanks by Evolve
Monkey & Dog: Coded Paws - Two pals cling tightly, hand in hand they stroll, One’s a wily monkey, one’s a tail-wagging soul. How to bond through thick and thin? When one sulks, the other grins— Secret codes only “we” control! Through foggy dawns or meteor showers, we charge through thorns, we sniff wildflowers. Let the world spin fast or slow... Our friendship's a bold cartoon— Paw prints chasing paw prints—Where? Nobody knows!

Breaking Plates, 2024, Australia, 25 min

Directed by Karen Pearlman
Produced by Richard James Allen
Choreography by Karen Pearlman
Featuring The Physical TV Company
Move aside Wonder Woman. Drop the pretence, Doris Day.  The film images that confine women to a ‘realistic’ role as housewife, nag, babe, or bitch have defined us for too long. Especially because in early cinema, before narrative conventions were ironclad, there were so many more ways to behave.  For decades, movies were made almost exclusively by men in Europe and the USA after 1925. So, the slapstick comediennes and cross-dressed cowgirls of early cinema, who were wild, powerful, rude, funny, and utterly out of male control, got forgotten, or worse, erased.  "Breaking Plates" collaborates with the curators of "Cinema’s First Nasty Women" to bring them back into view.  ‘Breaking Plates’ puts early films on the screen and then we talk to the characters in them, re-animate their antics, emulate their mayhem moves.  As we wear their clothes and battle their haywire machines, exploding gags, and eruptive bodies, we learn to wield humour as a weapon against the structures that contain us.

OffSpin Cycle, 2024, Canada, 9 min

Directed by Marites Carino
Produced by Marites Carino, Tentacle Tribe
Choreography by Emmanuelle Lê Phan
Featuring Tentacle Tribe
This whimsical group piece starts in a laundromat, then spins in unexpected directions. Inspired by Spanish visual artist Paco Pomet and directed by Marites Carino and choreography by Emmanuelle Lê Phan, OffSpin Cycle features Tentacle Tribe dancers and music from Tentacle Tribe’s cofounder, Elon Höglund. Mostly filmed on 16 mm in Montréal, the short film explores the unimaginable possibilities that open outside of one’s comfort zone. The project received a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and was financed by the Conseil des Arts du Québec (Québec Art Council).

drumming bodies dancing, 2023, United States, 25 min

Directed by Susanna Elisabeth Knittel
Produced by Laye Diedhiou
Choreography by Babacar Top
Close to the coast with the pirogues fishing canoes in Senegal, we are invited to a women’s sabar dance circle, a joyful exchange of teasing and pleasing audience with liberating moves to the rhythms of the drums. We see a drum lesson with children, drum making and market mingling with the renowned Senegalese Teranga, generosity in action. On washday, Babacar, the choreographer, and his dancers arrive to lead the girls through a Bara Mbaye, a song everybody knows. The well in another town brings up muddy water, but the dance goes on. It is a stabilizing force.