“Medicine and movement to heal ruptures. How to move?” An offhand quote spoken by the film’s main subject, Hadar Ahuvia, New York-based Israeli-American dancer and choreographer, could function as its tag line. It is a deep love of and attachment to her ancestral traditions that drive her impassioned research and critical questioning of them. Filmmaker Tatyana Tenenbaum turns a sensitive and thoughtful lens on Ahuvia’s art and teachings that bring forth challenging, even uncomfortable questions about the role of folk dance in ethnonationalist narratives—in this case, specifically in the Zionist project as it is inextricably tied to the creation of the state of Israel—with a palpable sense of care towards and connection with her various subjects.

Folk dance as return, as rewrite, as repeat, as reclaim. Folk dance as longing for belonging, for authenticity in diaspora, for groundedness in displacement. But what is obscured, and what appropriated? Ahuvia’s original and profound work breaks down elements of sound and movement to the minutiae in order to excavate these tough questions. In watching, we learn about layers that aren’t visible to the uninformed eye: for example, the eschewing of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish culture alongside a simultaneous unabashed absorption of Arab and Palestinian elements, an attempted erasure. Tenenbaum frames for us a model of how hard discussions, rather than cementing divisions and creating ruptures in families, communities, nations, can instead be generative, leading to dialogue and growth. If folk dance represents identity forged through collective movement, regional and ancestral traditions, it is also, as another of the film’s subjects Palestinian-American dabka dancer Amer Abdelrasoul describes, absolutely universal, “freedom of movement is to be human.”

Aurora Prelević
Writer, performance artist, cinephile, programmer