The first film I ever saw was The Red Shoes [1948], at the age of six. I remember sitting in the dark, eyes wide, breath held. I didn’t understand everything, but I felt it — the passion, the torment, the beauty, the all-consuming nature of artistic obsession. It was like the celluloid reached out and grabbed the deepest part of me. From that moment, I pursued classical ballet with the intensity only a child can summon, utterly convinced I, too, could live and die for my art.
Years later, I saw Red Rock West [1993], a gritty, stylish neo-noir by John Dahl, and it knocked the wind out of me again — but this time, it wasn’t the pirouettes or perfection that gripped me. It was the wild, unpredictable narrative; the unvarnished beauty of the American West; the tightrope of morality that Nicolas Cage’s character walks. Watching that film jolted something loose in my creative brain. It made me realise that film could be both raw and poetic. I didn’t need a stage. Nor did I need perfection. I needed a story.
Looking back now, decades into my programming career at Raindance, I realise these two wildly different films gave me the bookends of my artistic compass. One rooted in the beauty and discipline of craft. The other in the reckless, intoxicating spirit of independence. They also, in their own ways, mirror the Raindance ethos: the celebration of risk, originality, and a dogged pursuit of creative freedom.
The Red Shoes: Art as Obsession
Let’s talk about The Red Shoes first. Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece is more than just a ballet film. It’s a fever dream — a meditation on the collision between life and art, and the destruction that can follow when the two are indistinguishable.
As a child, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for themes like “dual identity” or “sacrifice for art,” but I was completely entranced by Moira Shearer’s performance. The swirling reds, the impossible lighting, the way movement itself told the story. Watching that film made me fall in love with the idea that storytelling didn’t need words — it could be expressed in movement, in silence, in colour.
This is something I’ve held onto throughout my curatorial life. At Raindance, we don’t just programme films with clever plots. We look for the ones where style is inseparable from substance. Where visual language does some of the heavy lifting. Where filmmakers understand that sometimes what isn’t said is more powerful than what is.
Powell and Pressburger’s willingness to push cinematic boundaries is exactly what independent film is about. The Red Shoes was a risk — a film with an extended ballet sequence in the middle that has little to do with plot progression and everything to do with psychological storytelling. That kind of bold formal experimentation still inspires me to champion directors who break the “rules”.
Red Rock West: Chaos, Character, and the Open Road
Fast forward to the ’90s. By the time I saw Red Rock West, I was already deeply embedded in the arts. But this film — this dusty, low-budget thriller made outside the Hollywood system — gave me a new vocabulary.
Here was a film that felt handcrafted. A little frayed at the edges. Made with conviction rather than permission. Nicolas Cage plays a man just trying to do the right thing, only to be swept into a tangled web of lies, mistaken identity, and murder. The lines between hero and villain are blurred. Every character is desperate, flawed, and utterly compelling.
And the location — the endless horizon of the American West — becomes its own character. That sense of space, of isolation and possibility, is something we see often in the best indie films. What Red Rock West taught me is that mood is just as important as mechanics. That plot can bend to character. That budget doesn’t dictate brilliance.
It was also a reminder that great films don’t have to be box-office darlings. Red Rock West had trouble finding a distributor. It was too noir to be mainstream, too character-driven to be pulp. But when it landed, it became a cult classic — beloved precisely because it didn’t fit a mould.
That’s the Raindance spirit in a nutshell.
Why These Two Films Still Guide Me
At Raindance, we’ve always been the home for square pegs in round holes — films that don’t quite sit neatly in genre boxes, filmmakers who don’t follow prescriptive arcs. Whether it’s a hyper-stylised dance drama or a grimy desert noir, what matters most is voice and intent.
The Red Shoes taught me to revere beauty and discipline. To respect how form can elevate content. Red Rock West taught me to embrace mess. To chase urgency, roughness, and the unpredictable rhythms of real life.
Together, they remind me to programme films that feel — not just films that tick the boxes. That’s why, at Raindance, we’re unafraid to put an experimental short next to a micro-budget comedy next to a political thriller. It’s not about trends. It’s about emotional honesty and creative bravery.
The Lesson for Filmmakers Today
If you’re a filmmaker reading this — take heart. You don’t need to come from a ballet background or a desert town. You don’t need big names or big budgets. What you need is a clear, compelling voice. One that understands where you came from and where you want your audience to go.
And sometimes that voice is formed by contradiction. Maybe you, like me, have two films inside you: one that’s elegant and one that’s feral. That’s good. Let them both in. Let them fight and fuse and dance together. The alchemy of art often lives in the tension between the sacred and the profane, the perfect and the broken.
A Raindance Hero
Dov S-S Simens was instrumental in directing Raindance
Read about Dov’s first memorable movie here;
Come As You Are
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Suzanne Ballantyne is the co-founder of Raindance (1993) and the British Independent Film Awards (1998). Since 1994 Suzanne has been watching movies in her role of Head of Programming of the Raindance Film Festival.
She has been a featured guest at four of the world’s premier film festivals: Rotterdam, Berlin, Toronto and Cannes. She has also served as a distinguished jury member on numerous festivals in Europe, America and Japan. As producer she has three award-winning feature films and has two projects with named cast in pre-production to her credit.
In 2017 she completed a Raindance MA in Filmmaking with Distinction.
