Grace + Gravity

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematography: Meryem Yavus
Dance: Idil Kemer
Voice: Lara Baladi
Music: Zeena Parkins
16 mm ◊ 8 min.

“Grace alone can give courage.” – Simone Weil

Published posthumous in 1947, Simone Weil’s elusive philosophical masterpiece "Gravity and Grace" [La pesanteur et la grâce] bridges question of physics, religion, and nature. In her abstract, evocative interpretation of Weil’s words — given voice by Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi — Madansky cuts between footage of dancer Idil Kemer in a studio and fleeting images of the natural world, invoking both the notebook-like structure of the original text, as well as Weil’s interest in mysticism. Throughout, Kemer employs movement as resistance—rather than obeying gravity and its attendant order of things. Grace + Gravity offers dance as a means of refutation, each gesture an act of freedom and agency. This determination is furthered by Kemer’s regards directed into the camera, a rare rupture in the filmmaker’s oeuvre.

Part of the Feminist Writers Series, an ongoing suite of films, inspired by the words of radical international feminists. Ranging from canonized to little-known figures, and unbeholden by genre, the films cite and respond to works of poetry, novels, theatre, theory, political writing, and other nonfiction.