Film
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Hanna Heiting came to New York from Israel to study Philosophy and Film at Columbia University. She worked in the film industry in New York and Los Angeles for 12 years on feature and documentary films.
In 1983, Hanna started making her own, personal films: Innkeeper 1984 (Big Sur), Landlight 1998 (Los Angeles), Improvising the Love Story 1997 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Daikinis 2000 (Amsterdam).
In that same year, her personal growth with Continuum began.
In 2009, she published Rite de Sortie, a book of poems primarily about her relationship to her family’s holocaust history. Her second book, My Problems with Empathy, published in 2017, is an intensely personal poetic-philosophical dance.
Em Moves 2011 is a tribute to Emilie Conrad and Continuum in appreciation for the philosophy and practices that supported Hanna to develop a deeper understanding of her life and creativity.
Emilie Conrad’s understanding of culture, body and the cosmos has changed my own philosophical investigation, but as a filmmaker, I am fascinated with her unique gifts of communication. Emilie conveys information, both scientific and mystical, in all the myriad artistic means she commands. The fluttering of her articulate fingers, her passionate resonance with Nijinsky and her unpredictable bursts of humor transform every presentation and demonstration into a divine ancient and modern theatrical art.
In classes as well as performances, her life story brought me back to myself, just as her sound frequencies affected mine before I did any sounding or movements of my own. The making of the film was not about documenting the precious fleeting moments, but rather a continuation of the movement that I felt inside me while watching her.
My interests lie not in talking about Continuum but in finding ways to express as honestly and simply as I can what touched me most about it as a transformative and creative process.
The film “Em Moves” attained its form and structure when I made editorial decisions about the parts of Emilie’s powerful and triumphant story that I chose to focus on, but it felt complete only when I was watching it for the thousandth and one time and found myself moving and breathing with it.