Coming to DVD and VOD today, Tuesday, February 11: BALLROOM CONFIDENTIAL
Brian Lilla’s look at ballroom dancing amongst a group of Florida retirees has held screenings in San Francisco and Ormond Beach, Florida, where it was shot. It now comes to DVD as well as to VOD via Amazon and Vimeo, expanding later to iTunes and Hulu.
Inspired by his mother’s experiences taking up ballroom dancing – earning her first-time producer credit here – filmmaker Lilla trained his camera on Caleb Young’s dance studio, and on several of the senior women who have found renewed vitality by working with the significantly junior instructor. Young, a NYC transplant to Florida, offers a safe space for his charges to let loose, maybe harmlessly flirt a little, cope in an active way with aging, and gain a sense of efficacy in mastering dance moves. Structured around an impending spy-themed one-night-only dance performance, Lilla’s film is fairly conventional but often entertaining. While it tries to juggle a character or two too many, sacrificing more indepth focus as a result, the film ultimately is able to convey the quiet but affecting impact the subjects’ involvement in Young’s studio has had on their lives.
what (not) to doc 