Simone Simon

Force of Nature -- FORCE OF NATURE (UK/US 75 minutes/2011) Documentary / performance Camera: Katrina McPherson Editor: Simon Fildes Music: Stephen Heather Additional Camera and sound: Rosalind Masson, Rob Page, Vidal Bini, Fred Parsons Funded by Goat Media, Creative Scotland, University of Dundee, University of Illinois. Produced by Goat Media in association with University of Illinois Champaign Urbana. A documentary featuring the renowned improvising dance artist Kirstie Simson. Over five years, Katrina filmed Kirstie Simson performing and teaching across Europe, culminating in a one-off performance with Michael Schumacher, Kenzo Kusuda and Dai Jian at the Universal Hall in July 2010. Force of Nature combines specially filmed performance, documentary footage and in-depth interviews with Kirstie, in which she talks about her life-long practice, and her passionate belief in the power of dance to bring people together and transform lives. Kirstie Simson has been a continuous explosion in the contemporary dance scene, bringing audiences into contact with the vitality of pure creation in moment after moment of virtuoso improvisation. She is an award-winning dancer and teacher who has 'immeasurably enriched and expanded the boundaries of New Dance'. according to Time Out Magazine, London. For the past thirty years Kirstie has collaborated with many dancers and musicians who share a common interest in Improvisation, including Julyen Hamilton, Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Simone Forti, Andrew Harwood, Russell Maliphant, Michael Schumacher, Adam Benjamin and Le Quan Ninh. In January 2008 Kirstie joined the faculty of the Dance Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she is a full-time teacher of Dance Improvisation.

Decadent ballrooms, bucolic countryside retreats, and urban bordellos! Max Ophuls brings his astonishing visual dexterity and storytelling bravura to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure.

Soldiers, chambermaids, poets, prostitutes, aristocrats--all are on equal footing in this multicharacter merry-go-round of love and infidelity.

A streak of bad luck tempts Jabez Stone, a hard-working farmer trying to make an honest living, to bargain with the Devil himself. When Jabez begins to realize the error of his choice, he enlists the aid of legendary orator and politician Daniel Webster.