Dancing Across Borders

Deb 5 Me 4

This is a straightforward documentary about a lady who is captivated by a young dancer she sees while on vacation in Cambodia. She goes hoe to New York and decides she wants to bring him home and set him up in ballet school. The kid has never been out of his village and seizes the opportunity.

It turns out that he is tutored by ballet’s leading teacher, giving him one-on-one attention for many years. In this time he learns English remarkably well, gets his high school diploma and makes friends. He continues to dance and enters domestic and international competitions, even does a performance in his native Cambodia.

He is an engaging kid, and he is surrounded with articulate people who speak highly but realistically about his gifts. It’s interesting.

But it’s not great. There are a lot of issues that are introduced but not resolved. First off, who is this lady that “finds” him in the jungles and bankrolls his way to competency? Where’d she get the gall and the bucks? How does she convince the leading ballet teacher to take him on in such an exclusive basis? He gets serious cramps throughout the beginning of the movie and they’re never mentioned again, what happened with them? There are a lot of things that should be answered or not brought up.

It was neat to see the quality of documenting him improved as his talents were recognized. In the beginning when he was dancing native street theater stuff he was recorded on some lousy format like VHS or something. In NY they record him on a better format and by the time he’s dancing in big shows the picture clarity is really quite good. The interviews and staged shots are all excellent quality.

The overall feeling I got was that this was done too soon. It was neat to see him taken from living with rats to being in the rat race, but he hadn’t arrived anywhere as a dancer yet. Another unresolved issue for me. In the beginning of the movie he was full of potential, at the end of the movie he was full of potential. I’d like the moviemaker to have waited until he got a good job or won a big competition or gave up or something, to complete the story, or at least make more of a complete cycle.