That has been bothering me the whole time

What we’re being confronted with isn’t immediately obvious: We hear deep breathing and the rustle and fall of textiles covering a dancing body. The camera stays close to it, thereby abstracting the structures and patterns produced by the movement.
Contrasts between light and dark are a powerful formal aesthetic element and also anticipate the dramatic mood, which will come to a head in the course of the film.
Although solely fragments of the body can be discerned at first, the gestures, strides and sounds convey an awareness of the body we would expect of a martial-arts fighter.
As soon as the dancer (Silke Grabinger) is shown in full, all this reverses: The clothing can now be identified as a burka, the complex history of which charges each movement and gesture with political significance. As this is unable to limit the dancer’s physical expressiveness, she successfully resignifies it all, though normally, this piece of clothing’s hardly associated with women power.
As it obviously wasn’t Arash T. Riahi’s intention to gloss over reality, this almost optimistic image is soon followed by a radical rupture: In the next shot the dancer hangs in the air like a marionette, all her freedom of movement and any possibility of personal expression taken away.
Her motionlessness signals the end, though this isn’t the final image in this unusual dance film: In a figurative sense the filmmaker lets the curtain fall and shows in colorful images that what we have seen is “merely” the impressive result of an extremely experimental fusion of modern dance, political issues and physical liberation. (Christa Benzer)


The film can be seen as a utopian suggestion. What happens, if you let a woman in a Burka do a performance, which could never be allowed to show publicly. At the end the set up is getting brought back to reality. We don’t claim this to be a real woman in a Burka, it becomes clear, that this is only a representation. The dancer Silke Grabinger is a body, which interprets something and can never really constitute the fate of those women. (Arash T. Riahi)

Orig. Title
That has been bothering me the whole time
Year
2013
Country
Austria
Duration
10 min
Director
Arash T. Riahi
Category
dance film/video
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Credits
Director
Arash T. Riahi
Performer
Silke Grabinger
Production
Golden Girls Filmproduktion
Available Formats
Digital File (prores, h264)
DCP 2K flat (Distribution Copy)
Aspect Ratio
1:1,85
Sound Format
Dolby Surround
Frame Rate
24 fps
Color Format
colour
Festivals (Selection)
2013
Roma - Cinema XXI International Film Festival
2014
Hong Kong - Int. Film Festival
Buenos Aires Festival Int. de Cine Independiente BAFICI
Wroclaw - New Horizons Festival
Bukarest - BIEFF Int Experimental Film Festival
Hamburg - Int. Kurzfilm-Festival & No Budget
Cambridge MIT - European Short Film Festival
Cork - IndieCork Film Festival
Wien - this human world International Human Rights Film Festival
Berwick - Film & Media Art Festival
2015
Regensburg - Kurzfilmwoche
Regensburg - Kurzfilmwoche
Nashville Film Festival
Wroclaw - WRO-International Media Art Biennale