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The Passions of Angela Simmons

A grieving former ballerina seeks transcendence amid the rituals of her approaching debutante ball.

synopsis

Texas, 2006. After a career-ending ballet injury, Angela, a college freshman, drifts through school and hollow sorority rituals. Her world shifts when she encounters Alex, a magnetic wrestler. Angela abandons her obligations and follows him to his hometown, where they connect over the rare transcendence experienced in pushing the body to its limit, in wrestling and ballet alike. After this fleeting, enigmatic encounter, Angela returns home for Christmas, when her debutante ball is set, a tradition she had always found vacant. Increasingly unmoored, Angela searches for a new kind of transcendence, like what she felt in ballet and with Alex. Things shift for Angela when she learns the debutante bow and gracefully performs it – ecstasy imbuing her movements. Her fervour infects the others, and what seems to begin as conformity becomes an awakening. As storms bear down, the rituals of high society culminate in a reckoning as Angela breaks open the social order she was meant to uphold.

Director’statement

This film draws from my experience as a former ballet dancer and debutante in Houston, Texas. Dance was my life until an accident ended my career with surgeries and forced acceptance of a body no longer able to pursue ballet. Around the same time, I was ushered into the hollow rituals of Houston’s debutante season. Walking across the ballroom, I felt dread and alienation, dissociating to endure the performance of femininity and privilege demanded of me. Ballet had felt transcendent; the debutante ball, vacant. The film emerges from this psychological rupture and from growing up in spaces of girlhood – ballet studios, sororities, summer camps – where intimacy and support were bound up with surveillance, discipline, and control. Rooted in choreography and performance, the film merges realism with mysticism. Like the Medieval mystics before her, Angela of Foligno and Margery Kempe, Angela experiences the crises of her time through her body. Her passion is not hysteria. It is revelation.

TFL PROGRAMME:
FeatureLab 2025

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