Monday 19 December 2016

Mattie Do: Horror Film? It's all ballet.

Still from Dearest Sister. Photo by Mart Ratassepp

Many things have been written about Mattie Do, the pioneering female film director from Laos. She’s put her country’s horror films on the world festival map. She wears international laurels including the BFI London Film Festival and is an alumni of the Cannes Film Festival’s Les Cinemas du Monde with a sassy badass sense of humour and glamorous heels. But I’m curious about the intersection of Mattie the director and Mattie the ballerina, whom I met five years ago at a small dance festival in Vientiane, and in whose living room I practiced tendus and jetes with a home-made barre.

Read at ArtsEquator