Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine and Wakefield Poole, Ballets Russes

A remarkable documentary due to its subject (two competing companies of the famous Ballets Russes), its rare, mostly never-before-seen archival footage, and the amazingly vital and often funny veterans of the troupes, some of whom have since passed away, Ballets Russes is that rare film that enchants even as it instructs. Produced, directed and written by the San Francisco-based team, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Ballets Russes begins with the end of the original Ballets Russes, the company founded in Paris in 1909 by the famed Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev that gave the world Nijinsky and ground-breaking works with music by Satie and Stravinsky in Picasso, Dali and Matisse settings. Geller and Goldfine also address what happened after Diaghilev's death in 1929. They follow artists like Leonid Massine, George Balanchine, Dame Alicia Markova and Maria Tallchief and observe their surprising legacy to dance not only in Europe but the United States, South America and Australia. Ballets Russes veteran dancer Wakefield Poole, who became a groundbreaking gay porn filmmaker in the '70s with Boys in the Sand, joins the interview with the filmmakers.

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