Marta Massa

The Body Hides (2020)

The Body Hides uses dance to explore the ways in which our bodies hold trauma.

The film was produced for the Film Medicine module. The focus of the course on elaborating a therapeutic intent as the main core of our films, was the primary drive in the making of The Body Hides. Can film be a medium to elaborate and rethink trauma? Can the representation of a unified experience between body and mind, provide a new way of processing our relationship with our bodies?

The film portrays the body in pain as subject rather than object of representation, in order to cultivate compassion and identification with a body that hides its own pain.

Ultimately the aim of the film is to eliminate the tendency to repress trauma, inherent in the perceived gap between body and mind, since as one of the contributors states: "If our body is not ours then our body is whose?"

What Remains

In the documentary, two women discuss their bodies. They remember the unity they felt with their bodies in childhood and how it was broken as they entered adulthood. Stella and Emma reflect on the societal pressures that have brought them to identify their bodies as enemies, and how their identities were shaped within and beyond this break.

Together, the filmmaker, contributors and camera explore the body not as vessel, object or sign but as a site for the formation of voice, histories and the self.

What Remains was produced as final project for the MA in FIlm Directing.