WWSFF 2009: Danse Macabre – Beauty In Death

Somehow, I’m not too surprised by director Pedro Pires’ revelation that he has a bit of a dark side. Death is, after all, at the forefront of his haunting 8 minute short ‘Danse Macabre.’

But once you get past the suicide in the abandoned church, the swaying, stifferning corpse and the embalming fluid and blood, there’s an undeniable beauty that flies in the face of our commonly held perceptions of death and the usually unseen processes that take place in the cold morgues and mortuaries around the world.

The main character in the film is a corpse, a young woman who used to be a dancer, and whose body is now being readied for its ultimate journey, during which her movements are akin to a final performance. There’s an eerie, graceful beauty to the process, extenuated by an operatic soundtrack.

“The film was more about the dead body and the transformation over a kind of technical process…we are just exposing what the body will receive after death in terms of transformation and we have also a dance project, and as a director I wanted to try to combine those two in a seamless way.

“I was trying to make something unique where the dance performer is the dead body.”

At the same time Pires is making a statement about our own inevitable deaths, and the fears that are associated with our mortality.

“It’s a taboo, people don’t want to hear about death and dead bodies,” he notes.

The film was shot in real morgues, and real blood was used. Pires himself had to confront his own anxieties when faced with the realities of the shoot.

“Everything was real, expect the dancer, of course.”

“It may be shocking for people to know that it is real but for me pouring fake blood in a tub means nothing compared (to the real thing)…but it has an impact, you open the fridge and there’s three bodies in there and they have their own expression and their own skin texture.”

In the end the filmmaker believes we must we confront, and accept death, to truly live our lives to the fullest.

“I think that we must face death so we can appreciate life even more each day. We have life but death is at the other side and we are at the middle of something. I think we must have both sides to fully appreciate life.”

michaelt@citytv.com

The CFC WorldWide Short Film Festival runs from June 16-21.  To purchase tickets or learn more about the fest, click here.

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