Mathilde Monnier

The french choreographer Mathilde Monnier and her preparation for her next performance is the main focus of this documentary. The choreography's practices and the bodies, everything is registered in some sort of anthropological way by the filmmaker's camera.

During the height of summer, Caroline, a forty-year-old Parisian and mother, arrives in a small village in the south of France. She must hastily organize the funeral of her mother, a flighty lawyer, whom she barely used to see. Caroline is welcomed by Pattie, who likes to talk about her love affairs with the local men to anyone who'll listen. Then, while the whole valley gets ready for the traditional mid-summer dance, Caroline's mother's corpse mysteriously disappears...

M.M. IN MOTION was four years in the making and draws upon Ostrovsky's filming of six Monnier choreographies (from 1988 to 1991) in rehearsals and performances. M.M. attempts to translate Monnier's essence, style and humor into cinematic terms using fragmentary, episodic and impressionistic images that capture the defining traits of her modus operandi.

Strange comings and goings in a boarding house kept by two old Buddhist Asian women: the recalcitrant cook chats up the idle chamber maid by going to fetch crabs in the attic; a hunted man, after sensual exchanges with a bare chested boy, ends up upstairs and dies; a motionless female client unsettles, by her silence, the habits of the household who dance before her…

An unprecedented way to watch contemporary dance through animated drawings. Choreographer Mathilde Monnier and cartoonist François Olislaeger co-sign this film and are also its main characters. They highlight the links between walking and dancing, real life and the stage.