Director’s Statement
“YEARS AGO when my legs were a bit more spry and my bedtime was a bit more lenient, I used to love to go out and dance to the hypnotic beats supplied by house & techno DJs at the various nightclubs around Boston. I soon noticed an older man, who without fail, as I scanned the crowd, would be bobbing and spinning amongst the throngs of twenty-somethings, smile on his face, eyes closed blissfully, without any indication that he saw himself as a fish out-of-water.
His name was Marc Gedansky (an apt name) and over the years, he’s become a friend as well as a fixture of the small, tight-knit subculture taking place around these venues. Despite his aberrant age, he crystallizes perhaps the thing I came to love most about these people: he lives to dance, unabashedly and with complete surrender to the music, never judgmental, always open-hearted.
Marc returning home from hip re-replacement surgery.
When I set out to document his life last summer, I expected to tell a story about the COVID-19 pandemic, a love letter from an elderly man who had been cut off from his community by the virus and the risks posed by his age. But documentary has a way of sending you in unexpected directions. I discovered that, over the years of dancing, Marc has persevered through eleven orthopedic surgeries on his legs, each one presenting arduous rehabs and the risk that he would not dance again.
In the fall, Marc had a hip re-replacement to repair the worn out socket that had been put in twenty years before. When he came out of that surgery, he suffered from nerve loss, a condition known as “drop foot.” Months later, his recovery has been complicated further by lymphedema, an issue where the body cannot properly circulate lymphatic fluid so that it drains into the extremities, causing swelling and immobility. What was already the hardest rehab of his life has gotten that much harder. And now the ending I had envisioned – of Marc triumphantly whirling around the dance floor, reunited with his younger friends – is in peril.
Furthermore, the isolation imposed by the pandemic has taken on a different light. Rather than a momentary pause from the “norm,” it now gives a sober look at how Marc’s life might look if his body no longer allows him to return to his dance-floor oasis. Marc is single, lives alone and has structured his entire life around dancing. For a man who is set on defying his age, this story may evolve from one of return, to one of reckoning and reinvention.
My role as filmmaker is to document that process, to hone in on the precarious and vulnerable moments where Marc has to dig deep and steel his resolve for whatever lies ahead. It’s also my job to counterbalance this narrowing of focus with the opposite impulse – to broaden the scope of what’s possible for Marc and for the film, to help him explore new truths, and load the film with potential energy. When making a documentary, you have to be ready to navigate a constantly forking road, but the stories worth telling tend to have this mix of forward momentum and unexpected hairpin turns. It’s my promise to Marc, to the community, and the eventual audience of this film, to tell this story diligently and expansively, but most of all, earnestly.” - David Walker, Director