BARE: A Pulse-Pounding, Intimate and Expertly Choreographed Dance Documentary

Allow me to introduce you to BARE – a pulse-pounding dance documentary featuring the brazen and entirely nude choreography of Thierry Smits’s new dance, Anima Ardens?

Director Aleksandr M. Vinogradov’s film follows 11 men who audition, rehearse, and perform this challenging piece exploring masculinity, power, and voyeurism. With charged performances, and so much skin on display, the proceedings could easily veer into eroticism; instead, this masterfully constructed film grapples with the complexity of artistic collaboration while deconstructing rote concepts of sexuality.

Prior to its DOC NYC debut, BARE held its World Premiere at Hot Docs.

Get into it, 11 naked men audition, rehearse and perform for the premiere of master Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits’s new contemporary dance piece Anima Ardens. Mixing intimate rehearsal footage with extensive and breathtaking dance sequences, BARE follows the choreographer and his team as they work to explore difficult, often taboo subjects through nudity and dance. In this bold exploration of artistic conflict, gender, and sexuality the one constant is the conceit that the body is the last bastion of personal freedom.

Aleksandr M.Vinogradov Director | Producer

Aleksandr M. Vinogradov is Karelian film director, who was born in the North of Russia. He moved to Moscow in 2002 and in 2012 graduated Moscow Film School with a short film “Five Steps of Butoh” about a Russian dancer performing the contemporary Japanese dance butoh. The film got Grad Prix, Best Documentary and Best Cinematography awards at Telemania Film Festival in 2012 and went to festivals in Europe. In 2013 he started documentary filmmaking master program DocNomads. His graduation film “Call Me Chaos” was premiered at Visions Du Reel in 2016. The same year Aleksandr applied to LUCA School of Arts to the visual arts master program. Meanwhile he was developing two feature documentaries: a character-driven story “FORBIDDEN TANGO” about LGBTQ tango dance community in Russia and an experimental observational film “BARE” about nude male dancers in the performance of the Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits. His graduation work from LUCA School of Arts was a short film “Under the dress” about a personal story of the director dealing with the sexual identity. The film was premiered at Visions Du Reel in 2019.

For about 25 years, Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits has asserted an artistic approach that is well off the beaten path in

Thierry Smits
Choreographer | Producer

many respects, one that is frequently controversial and often goes against the tide. Alternating pure dance productions with more performative pieces, his work explores our relationship to the body – as an object of desire, pleasure and finiteness – which Smits considers, today more than ever, as a political space, «the only free territory left to us.