Sofia Coppola has directed a new short film for… | Little White Lies

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Sofia Cop­po­la has direct­ed a new short film for the New York City Ballet

07 May 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Monochrome image of a person sitting on the floor in a large, empty room with high windows.
Monochrome image of a person sitting on the floor in a large, empty room with high windows.
The 26-minute mood piece cap­tures the majesty of the dance com­pa­ny for their Spring Gala.

Sofia Cop­po­la is the Amer­i­can cinema’s most con­scious­ly bi-coastal auteur, hav­ing giv­en us essen­tial Los Ange­les films like Some­where and The Bling Ring before mov­ing to New York in 2010 and bring­ing her work with her, set­ting A Very Mur­ray Christ­mas and On the Rocks in the city that nev­er sleeps. An unex­pect­ed new project from Cop­po­la fur­ther cements her rep­u­ta­tion as an assim­i­lat­ed-and-proud New Yorker.

She’s direct­ed a twen­ty-six minute short for the New York City Bal­let on the occa­sion of the Spring Gala fundrais­er, show­cas­ing the city’s pre­em­i­nent dance com­pa­ny in all its glo­ry. Coppola’s con­tri­bu­tion will be avail­able to stream until 20 May, begin­ning around the six-minute mark in the linked video.

In crisp dig­i­tal-black-and-white, Cop­po­la trains her lens on the dancers and instruc­tors of the NYCB, bask­ing on the pure majesty of bod­ies in motion. The high-con­trast cin­e­matog­ra­phy has a beau­ti­ful way of accen­tu­at­ing mus­cu­la­ture, allow­ing us to see the pow­er and pre­ci­sion of the tech­niques these per­form­ers have spent their lives perfecting.

As a title card spells out, these devo­tees of dance have been sep­a­rat­ed from the stu­dio that they call home since March 2020 due to COVID-19 clo­sures, and Cop­po­la got the priv­i­lege of join­ing them as they make their first return to those hal­lowed grounds. Even if you’re not a New York­er, there’s a potent emo­tion­al com­po­nent to this pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al, doc­u­ment­ing the soul-deep spir­i­tu­al con­nec­tion we can have to the pub­lic spaces we’ve missed so badly.

While news of Coppola’s next fea­ture effort has yet to sur­face, this scratch­es the same itch as the rest of her more recent work, offer­ing us glimpses of cool cityscapes and urban inte­ri­ors in art­ful­ly com­posed shots. It’s a sol­id minor work for a good cause, art for art’s sake – what’s more wor­thy of the people’s gen­eros­i­ty than that?

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