On the eve of Pakistan’s 70th independence anniversary, we follow the spirited 90 year old guru Indu Mitha, as she prepares for her students’ final performance before she retires. HOW SHE MOVES pulls back the curtain on her life as one of Pakistan’s few classical dance teachers. We observe her give a feminist and secular spin on classical dance, and see the transformative impact it has on her students.
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On the eve of the 70th anniversary of Pakistan’s partition from India and independence from Great Britain, How She Moves tells the story of the spirited Ms. Indu Mitha, an elderly classical dance teacher, as she prepares for her final public performance in Islamabad. Ms. Mitha, of Bengali Christian background, has been teaching Bharatanatyam in Pakistan for the past six decades. Though Bharatanatyam is traditionally associated with stories of Hindu deities, under her creative direction, the dance form has been given a secular and feminist flavor in Pakistan, and has had a transformative impact on her students, who hail from all walks of life.
HOW SHE MOVES pulls back the curtain on her life as one of Pakistan’s few classical dance teachers. In a nation still exploring its cultural identity post-partition, we explore Ms. Mitha’s quest to disseminate and preserve a unique and shared heritage of the Indian subcontinent.
During the film, we shadow Indu and her dancers for the ten day buildup to her final performance, while simultaneously taking a deeper look into what makes her legacy so worth preserving. Through both verité footage and intimate interviews, we capture Ms. Mitha’s unique charm, candor and rebellious spirit, weaving in and out between the build up to the show and the history that brought us here.
Through an exploration of the colorful artistry of Indu and her students, we glean insight into culture, identity, and freedom of expression in a country where extremism, nationalism, and suspicion of dance as a legitimate art form push the classical dance towards extinction. Using dance as a prism, through telling the intimate story of Indu Mitha we tell a story of global significance.
Dir. Aisha Linnea Akhtar & Anya Raza. USA, 2020. Running time: 43 mins.
