BELLY

 Sensual…Scarred…Sacred...

Director’s Statement:

   I dreamed of making a documentary about belly-dance years before I started making films. Up to this point, my husband wrote and directed most of our projects. This is my turn to tell a story.

    I have been a dancer all my life.  After the almost overwhelming heartbreak of not becoming a professional ballerina in my mid teens, I felt that I would have to find a way to live my life without dance.  Some experiences with modern dance in college almost fed my hunger for dance, and then I found belly dance at age 23. I found my soul food, and it has nourished me for 14 years, and can and will feed my soul for however many years or decades I have left on this earth.

   I have danced through illness, surgery, and grief. I have raised my children, fallen in love, gotten married, and changed careers many times while belly dancing. And I am looking forward to taking it to the next level and expect to hit my prime in 17 years at the age of 55, when most belly dancers hit their peak.

   I have been incredibly blessed by the opportunity to get to know and love my sister dancers.  Their stories are amazingly rich with the different aspects of what it is to be a     woman.  They are everyday heroes, Goddesses in disguise, and at the same time just like every other woman. Belly-dance has created new rituals for women to express themselves, their pain, and their joy.

    BELLY tells personal stories of what it is like to be a belly-dancer, but more than that, it tells personal stories of what it is like to be woman.  As women, we hold the fabric of society together.  It is the unsung but heroic acts that keep the world spinning. It is the women who care for people on both sides of their passage in and out of this world.  We work and care and love, and give.  This is a story about how we also celebrate and play.

    I chose 7 different dancers, or dance groups, some that I knew very well, and some I had never met before. I picked them from small Idaho towns, to large metropolitan areas.  All of whom agreed not only to let us interview them, but also offered us a place to sleep and food to eat.  The making of BELLY was in the same spirit of community that is created by belly-dance.

-Cecilia Rinn