The Mother: a short dance film

Choreographer Arthur Pita's The Mother, created especially to showcase the Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova's multiple talents, was a harrowing stage work, which premiered in London's Southbank just over a year ago. You can read Culture Whisper's full review here.

Now it transpires that while rehearsing the stage work at the very atmospheric Stone Nest, the former Welsh Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue, Arthur Pita and his dancers – Natalia Osipova and Jonathan Goddard – found the time to make a short film inspired by the stage work, but distilling its very essence into just under four minutes.

The French-Colombian director Emmanuel G Cuesta and his cinematographer Boris Laroche came from Paris for a one-day shoot. Yann Seabra, designer of the stage work, dressed the space, and the production team and film-makers engaged in the kind of productive brain-storming that ends up generating exciting work.

Emmanuel G Cuesta is defined by his immersion in the arts, culture and anthropology. Today he is known for his documentary approach combined with a passion for beauty, movement, storytelling and art.

His film of The Mother, shot in black and white, is slow, wistful, evolving like a dream. Some of its images are indeed nightmarish, but there's none of the frenzy that at times possesses the stage work; it is, rather a distillation of feelings of loss and hopelessness, of inexorable destiny, portrayed by Osipova and Goddard. The close-ups, particularly of Osipova, create images of unforgettable intensity.

Music by Lena Kaufman, Asya Sorshneva, and Denis Grotsky, where plaintive strings predominate, completes a haunting, extremely beautiful work.

You'll want to watch it multiple times and you can do so here: