This film was released 10th December 2010, and is no longer screening.

Much-loved French character actor Mathieu Amalric won Best Director at Cannes for this loose and intimate portrait of a group of American ‘new burlesque’ dancers doing the rounds in provincial France while their manager (Amalric himself) struggles to keep it together. Showcasing the girls’ 1950s-influenced glam artistry, Amalric’s film contrasts the release of performance against the isolating grind off stage. Statuesque Miranda Colclasure – a veteran artiste herself – is certainly touching as ‘Mimi Le Meaux’, whose tentative stirrings of affection for her manager offset Amalric’s typical turn as a walking disaster-area. Naming the character Zand after his own mother, and facing a domestic situation not unlike the actor’s own (Amalric has two sons by his ex-wife Jeanne Balibar) indicates a strong autobiographical element, and while his direction is marvellously alert to the ad hoc interaction of people and places, it’s also a deeply-felt expression of the transient moments of belonging performers experience on the road together. On with the show! (Notes by Trevor Johnston).