USA, Documentary, 2015, 68min. Dir: Tamar Rogoff & Daisy Wright. Japan Premiere!
Synopsis & UPAF Memo:
The unlikely collaboration between a veteran choreographer and a young actor with cerebral palsy delivers astonishing proof that each and every body is capable of miraculous transformation. As Tamar Rogoff trains Gregg Mozgala to become a dancer, they discover that her lack of formal medical training and his fears and physical limitations are not obstacles, but the impetus for their unprecedented discoveries.
“Enter The Faun” is the story of a joyous, obsessed journey towards opening night. It challenges the boundaries of medicine and art, as well as the limitations associated with disability.
After the film, Tamar and Gregg established “Cerebral Posse” and began giving workshops for people with disabilities to share their experience. They were also invited to a conference at a Columbia University Medical Center. The movement is spreading in the US and beyond. Come to be inspired by the strength of human contact, get rare insight into being a person with a disability, and ponder the concept of identity.
Screened at Margaret Mead Film Festival, Dance on Camera Festival in New York.
Viewing guide for young audiences: There is no violence in this film. Some dance sequence can be felt sexual but also nurturing. Recommended for all ages. In English with Japanese subtitles.
Crew Bio
Tamar Rogoff (Co-Director/Producer) is a filmmaker and choreographer who has presented performances at The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, P.S. 122 and La Mama. Her performance The Ivye Project in Belarus was the subject of a documentary, Summer in Ivye also directed by Rogoff and Daisy Wright (The Hamptons International Film Festival, The Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center). Rogoff choreographed for Claire Danes and coached her in the Emmy Award winning HBO movie Temple Grandin. She is presently working on Grand Rounds, a dance/theater piece premiering at LaMaMa Theater in April 2017. Rogoff has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, VSA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and teaches her own laboratory class at LaMaMa. She is on the faculty in the Experimental Theater Wing at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.
Daisy Wright (Co-Director/Editor) has been editing for over 15 years. Her credits include eight programs for the PBS series Frontline (one received an Emmy Award, another the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award); the Bob Woodruff special for ABC To Iraq & Back (Peabody Award, 2007); La Boda and Escuela for POV; Ultimate Power and Call of the Wild with Peter Jennings for ABC; the film Bye-Bye Babushka (Prix Joris Ivens Award), and numerous other programs for American Masters on PBS, City Arts on WNET, TLC, VH1, HBO Family, CBS Sunday Morning, CNBC, The National Geographic Channel, and The Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Daisy also co-directed and edited both This Land is Your Land with Lori Cheatle (Whitney Biennial 2006), and Summer in Ivye with Tamar Rogoff (Hamptons International Film Festival 2001).
Véronique Bernard (Executive Producer) has more than 20 years experience in film and television documentaries. She was head of production at SBS TV in Australia and a producer and program development executive at WNET Culture & Arts Documentaries, Sundance Channel Original Programming, New York Times Television, National Geographic Television and ABC News Productions. As senior producer for E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious, a PBS series on sustainable development, she won a Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award of Merit. Her latest projects include a French co-production feature documentary about American photographer Duane Michals, The Man Who Invented Himself (winner of the Special Mention Award at International Festival of Film on Art FIFA 2013) and the PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 8 which premieres in September 2016.
Gregg Mozgala (Dancer/Actor) is the Artistic Director of The Apothetae, a theater company dedicated to the production of works that explore and illuminate the “Disabled Experience.” A critically acclaimed actor and playwright, Gregg has been in various New York productions Off and Off-Off Broadway. Along with choreographer, Tamar Rogoff, he has been invited to speak about the effects of cerebral palsy at the Wyss Institute For Biological Engineering at Harvard University, La Rabida Children’s Hospital in Chicago, Eastern Carolina University Medical School, Columbia University Medical School and the Kennedy-Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD. He now teaches and works with adults and young people with CP and he helped to start the first “Cerebral Posse” in New York City.