“Julia's Dance: A Bomba Flamenco Bedtime Tale,” directed by Christopher Santiago

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San Diego Short Film Festival

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Musical

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TRT 13:00

 

There isn’t much more to say about the story that isn’t already reflected in the title. A father (Roman Broussard) is reading his daughter (Lucy Cuellar) a bedtime story. As every parent will relate to, the child isn’t ready to sleep – and we get to spend the next 10 minutes or so as passengers in her flight of fancy.

The credits say the film was inspired by “When Julia Danced Bomba,” a bilingual children’s book written by Raquel M. Ortiz – who along with Santiago shares an executive producer credit. “Bomba” is a Puerto Rican dance style created under European colonialism, blending Old World and New World styles as interpreted by sugar plantation slaves from Africa at the turn of the 19th century.

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The film presents us with three staged dances: one featuring a Bomba dancer (Emma Manzanares), a second with a flamenco dancer (Arleen Hurtado) and then a third with both of them. Santiago eschews a documentary style here, opting instead for something much more intimate and befitting the father/child segments that bookend the dance performances. The camera is so close to the dancers that you basically never see their whole bodies, and there are several sequences shown in slow motion while the music continues to drive at a steady beat. Santiago punctuates the staged dances with Cuellar dancing on a sunny beach, sometimes interpreting the dancers’ moves through her young lens and sometimes just playing around.

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Everything presented on screen is sumptuous and engaging. There are clever editing flourishes, subdued and thematically appropriate special effects, and pops of color and shadow that keep the images flowing in time with the beat. Speaking of which, the music – an original score by William Cepeda – sounds fantastic and is used flawlessly.