CONTRADANCE

Directed by — Ansel Tan & Britney Kam
Story by — Ansel Tan
Screenplay by — Alicia L’Archêveque & Ansel Tan
Director of Photography — Ansel Tan
Composer — Sye Perry

Format
Hybrid live-action / stop-motion feature

Story

Thomas arrives in a country coming apart at the seams. He is chasing a story about Sasha, one of the last engineers of the Soviet space programme. When the state that employed her disappeared overnight, she retreated to a cabin in a meadow and began building a rocket out of salvaged parts, for no one, and for nothing, because the knowledge in her hands had nowhere else to go.

What begins as reportage becomes a life together, and the life becomes its own kind of dream — one they build the way she builds the rocket, piece by piece, out of whatever’s left. Thomas, blocked and adrift in his own work, finds his hands moving again in her orbit; Sasha, guarded and self-sufficient, lets herself want something for the first time in years. Around them the country is dissolving, but inside the small radius of their meadow they keep constructing a future neither of them can fully justify and neither can stop reaching for.

But Thomas loves the way he knows how to love: by holding on, by keeping, by needing the thing in front of him to be provable. And in a country where visibility has never once meant safety, that instinct will cost them everything.

The film moves between two registers: the lived world, and the stop-motion world Thomas builds within it from felt and balsa to hold onto it — a dollhouse, a shared dream of flight, a way of making the unbearable size of what they’re building small enough to keep. Contradance is, in the end, a tragedy about the difference between loving something and needing to prove it was real.

Visual approach

Imagine if Hayao Miyazaki directed a film about total thermonuclear war. Contradance is directed with the warmth and wordless intimacy of Studio Ghibli, combined with the spiritual patience of Andrei Tarkovsky and the tragic banality of Don DeLillo. Live-action sequences are intercut with a stop-motion narrative Thomas builds within the film itself: a dollhouse and felt-puppet reconstruction of their relationship, and eventually the couple’s own shared dream, rendered by hand. The tension between what’s dreamed, what’s built, and what’s recorded is the film’s formal argument as much as its plot.