Arquivo

The documentary reconstitutes the fascinating biography of legendary actress, ballet dancer and choreographer Maya Deren, one of the central figures in avantguard cinema in the U.S. in the forties and fifties. Born in Kiev, Ucrania, in 1917, Eleonora Derenkovskaya (her real name) moved to the U.S. with her family in 1922. The move was motivated by precarious economic conditions in the URSS at the time (that brought poverty to her then rich Jewish family) through persecution from the Trotsky party (as in the case of her father) and through the practice of the “pogrom” in the country (lynching Jewish people in practice by Russian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century). In addition to acting in classics in experimental cinema, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in a Transfigured Time (1946), Maya Deren enriched her biography by becoming greatly involved in the study and practice of voodoo.