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LA DANZA DI SABA - VITA, DONNA, LIBERTÀ

By Shayan ABBASIAN

BLACK LIGHT FILM - as PROD / FIN

Documentary - Development 2024

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ITALIAN
- Budget
- 0.6 - 1 M$
- Duration
- 100 mn
- Director(s)
- Shayan ABBASIAN
- Cast
- Saba POORI
- Synopsis
- The documentary tells the story of Saba, a 24-year-old Iranian dancer, selected by the Susanna Beltrami Dance Academy for the Eurasia Dance Project and now an activist using her choreography for the women's liberation movement in Iran: Woman Life Freedom.
  
  The film opens with Saba participating in a demonstration of the Woman Life Freedom movement. Then we see her walking through the streets of Milan, practicing a choreography, and finally, calling other dancers to organize a flash mob in memory of women suppressed by the Iranian regime. Through Saba's voice overlapping the images, we begin to learn about her current situation.
  
  Saba moved to Milan four years ago because she wants to dance, and she cannot do so in her home country. In Iran, after the 1979 revolution, women are severely prohibited from, among other things, dancing in public, punishable by whipping, arrest, and, in extreme cases, death. Saba's decision to move to Italy to dance has not been without consequences, but it has become a political issue for the Iranian government. During her last trip to Iran, Saba was arrested, her passport was confiscated, and she was ordered not to dance abroad anymore. At this point, she made the dramatic decision to return to Italy to dance, leaving her family and Iran, where she cannot currently return.
  
  Saba's story is a human tale of protest, rebellion, and personal affirmation of a woman who, through dance, reclaims her body, takes it away from religious theocracy, and sets it in motion in the common, civil, shared space, and, with this film, also in the media. Saba's dancing body in motion, shared with the audience through her choreography, protests against the blocked, concealed, non-public body that is forcibly deprived of clandestine dance in her country.