Thirty years after its first screening, Ballet by the legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman stands as a portrait of the American Ballet Theatre, observing the dancers’ daily routines without directorial intervention. The first part focuses on the demanding physical training and the choreographers’ working methods, while the second follows the company on a European tour with stops in Athens and Copenhagen.
*The screening will be introduced by Bettina Panagiotarara (dance researcher and theorist), invited as part of Ethnofest’s collaboration with the Kalamata International Dance Festival.
Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman is a film and theater director of 46 films, primarily focusing on American institutions. His most recent film MENUS-PLAISIRS—Les Troisgros was released in Fall 2023. In 2019, he was the honoree of the Library Lions Award from the New York Public Library and received the Pennebaker Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. In 2018, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2016, he received an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. In recent years, he directed The Belle of Amherst, Beckett’s Happy Days in Paris and Vasily Grossman’s The Last Letter at the Comédie-Française in Paris and Theatre for a New Audience in New York. A ballet inspired by his first film, TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), premiered at the New York University Skirball Theater in 2017