Only When I Dance is a 2009 documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 directed by Beadie Finzi.

Synopsis

Only When I Dance tells the story of two teenagers, Irlan and Isabela, who pursue their dreams of becoming professional ballet dancers as a way to escape the violent slums of Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

.

Release

The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival

The Tribeca Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the consequent loss of vitality in the TriBeCa neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.The mission of the festival...

 in April 2009. It was subsequently shown at several other major film festivals, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival

Edinburgh International Film Festival

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...

, the San Francisco International DocFest, the Latino Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest. It was broadcast on television in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 on Christmas Day 2009.

Production

The producers spent over three years trying to find the candidates to be filmed, and the film took around ten months to film.

Reception

The film received mostly positive reviews from critics, with The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

awarding it four out of five stars and calling it a "moving, if rather shallow documentary". The website Eye for Film awarded the film three and a half out of five stars, saying the film "shows how an artistic calling can be imbued with life-and-death determination."