The American-Hungarian feature-length documentary film Who Cares About Pal Frenak, which
highlights the extraordinary life of Pal Frenak, the internationally acclaimed contemporary dance choreographer from France and Hungary, and simultaneously serves as a universally
understandable metaphor for the mechanism of creation, will be screened at 12:00 PM on
February 23, 2025 as part of the 53rd Dance on Camera Festival, taking place from February 21 to 24 in New York.
Dance on Camera, the world's longest-running dance-themed film festival, received 200
submissions this year from 33 countries. The festival's screenings will take place at the Symphony Space multidisciplinary performing arts center, located on Broadway and founded in 1978.
The film is a portrait of Pal Frenak, from his traumatic childhood to current-day success, and how he cleverly cheated tragedy and the resulting inner demons through his commitment to art. It reveals the heroic odyssey of the choreographer, the eighth hearing child born to deaf parents, who was placed in an orphanage at six years old after his father's untimely death. He learned early that only the art of movement and dance would save him from the traumatic experiences growing up without family in a loveless and repressive communist country. Escaping Budapest, as a young man, he matured and finally flourished in the open culture of Paris.
Pal Frenak's first language was signing, and his resistance to communicating in a common language complicated his life until he was in Paris and was obliged to learn French. The power of his gift to communicate the tragic and the comic, the absurd and the profound, the sacred and the profane. His captivating use of text, music, and design, along with his fascination with the sensual worlds of both the feminine and masculine, continues to seduce audiences time and time again.
Today Pal Frenak's Company FrenAk is one of the most heralded cutting-edge contemporary dance theaters companies in Europe and Asia.
Who Cares About Pal Frenak was realized over nearly 10 years through independent financing led by New York-based producer Vittoria de Bruin, who is also known for producing the musical film City of Klezmer, which features the Budapest Klezmer Band. The film's line producers are Fruzsina Móricz and Ilona Kőhegyi, and its cinematographers are Balázs Hatvani, Dániel Reich, and Márton Gothár. The director of the film is Glória Halász, who, in addition to directing films on various topics, has also created several dance-related productions, such as Three Dances, a documentary about male classical ballet students, and Mirrored, a TIE (Theatre in Education) performance inspired by the world of classical ballet, presented at the National Dance Theatre in Budapest.
The film was previously part of the program at the 36th Girona Film Festival in Spain and in the
Film Hungaricum program in Berlin at the legendary Kino Babylon. It will soon also be presented as part of Dance Camera Istanbul in Turkey.
More information and ticket purchases: https://www.symphonyspace.org/events/dance-on-
camera-program-8
Comments