Private Project

Perpetual Motion

“Perpetual Motion” is a short, dance-art film that explores relationships, sexuality, love and loneliness. The film is a single, fluid shot that moves around a crowded bar, landing on different couples and individuals whose inner world are suddenly manifested through dance. While a bar is a place of conversation, those conversations are often just the outer layer of a rich emotional world that can include love, anger, passion, and loneliness. It is the subtext behind an ordinary evening in a bar that becomes the multiple stories of “Perpetual Motion.”

  • Micah Smith
    Director
  • Micah Smith
    Writer
  • Tamir Ginz
    Writer
  • Ezra Ani
    Writer
  • Miriam Smith
    Producer
  • Gabriela Mischel
    Producer
  • Kamea Dance Company
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Other
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 13, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    15,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Israel
  • Country of Filming:
    Israel
  • Shooting Format:
    Black Magic Ursa 4k
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.35:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Saint-Petersburg International Film Festival
    Saint-Petersburg
    Russian Federation
    July 25, 2018
    World Premiere
Director Biography - Micah Smith

Micah Smith is an award-winning director of short films and feature-length documentary films, as well as the founder and artistic director of Shoot East, a production company based in Israel. His short films and documentary features have been accepted to and won awards at film festivals around the world. Micah is currently completing his third feature-length documentary, Sustainable Nation, and has recently released an independent web series, Pillow Talk.

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Director Statement

"Perpetual Motion" is about the never-ending story of love and loneliness that makes up a central component of the human condition. The film is presented as a single, fluid shot for two primary reasons. First, I wanted this unending story of relationships and their emotional impact to be manifest in a camera choice that also had no beginning or end. Second, I wanted to express that our seemingly private emotional journies are actually all interconnected and part of a larger story, a story we all share a part in as members of a community, a culture, a part of humanity.

In theater conservatory I always found the fourth wall to be a barrier that undermined the realism, the truth of what was being communicated on stage. In this film, I wanted to take dance off of the stage, and push beyond the barriers of much of dance art film that still frequently uses the location as a "space apart" from the real world. Therefore, the film is set in a location that is bursting with naturalistic life and activity, the dancers immersed in reality rather than separated from it.

I approached the score for this dance film in an unusual manner. Like my narrative films, it seemed an intrusion to have the dancers rehearse and perform to music. Certainly, in a "normal" film, the actors follow their instincts for rhythm and tempo rather than that which was predetermined by a composer. And so, "Perpetual Motion" was filmed with no music, no click track, and we constructed the score for the film around the performances. We then chose to mix the music into the sound design of the film as a part of the environment's audio rather than as disconnected "score," giving it the feeling of a live band in the bar in order to, again, give the film and its stories a greater sense of realism.

In the end, I hope these choices give "Perpetual Motion" a sense of naturalism that allows viewers to more deeply connect with the emotions at play in the film and experience dance not as an interpretation, but as a manifestation of universal emotional truths.