Explore Traditional Dance on Screen at Pomegranates Festival Opening

Opening night film programme blends tradition, innovation and global voices

Kicking off the 2025 edition of the Pomegranates Festival, World Trad Dance on Screen brings a rich and varied film programme to Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre on Friday 25 April. The curated collection of ten international shorts — screening at 6:30pm — offers a rare focus on traditional dance through the cinematic lens, spanning styles as varied as Highland, Chinese Ji Guan, Hip Hop and Indian Kathak.

This marks a striking opening for the six-day festival (25–30 April), which TheQR has previously previewed as a celebration of traditional dance in all its global complexity. Organised by the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, the festival aims to promote and support both Scottish and world traditional dance practices. While live performance is typically the medium of choice for such work, this opening night is firmly rooted in film, seeking to seed what its curators describe as an emerging genre: traditional dance for the screen.

Traditions reframed: from Scottish step to street dance

The evening’s programme includes three films by Canadian filmmaker Marlene Millar, a longstanding contributor to the international dance film circuit. Her To Begin the Dance Once More, choreographed by Vincent Hantam and based on a poem by Donald Smith, was the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland’s first-ever commissioned screen dance, weaving Scottish and Egyptian stories of motherhood.

Millar also presents Offering, a vibrant, body-percussive collaboration featuring street dance artist Omari Motion Carter; and Bhairava, co-directed with Philip Szporer, a cinematic evocation of Shiva filmed at the ancient Indian site of Hampi.

Local traditions are represented too. HOME, by Scottish cinematographer Kes Tagney, features step dancer Sophie Stephenson in a lyrical homage to place and belonging, while Second Guessing, by Bgirl and filmmaker Emma Ready, takes a hard look at coercive control through the language of breakdance.

Estonian-Scottish artist Mare Tralla’s The Bright Fabric of Life adds further depth, using African traditional dance to explore motherhood and kinship.

Other featured works include Hanna Tuulikki’s Deer Dancer, a striking meditation on masculinity through movement; Lyuxian Yu’s Crowned by Flame, which fuses cigarette-box percussion and Yi culture iconography; and Olga Maloney’s Echoes of a Taiko Drum, blending Georgian, Irish and Kathak forms with Japanese Taiko.

***The Bright Fabric of Life*** directed by Mare Tralla

Jonzi D’s Autocorrect, a hip hop short commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, rounds out the programme.

A global platform for a genre in the making

Pomegranates Festival co-founder Iliyana Nedkova has long questioned the lack of visibility for traditional dance on screen. This opening night programme is her answer.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session featuring Ready, Tralla and Tagney — offering a rare chance to hear directly from artists working at the intersection of heritage and film.

Tradition, framed anew

By turning the lens toward movement, the World Trad Dance on Screen programme offers more than a cross-cultural showcase — it’s an effort to redefine how traditional forms can be experienced in the 21st century.

In bringing these films together, the Pomegranates Festival signals an appetite for innovation within the field of traditional dance, and – hopefully – a growing audience for the genre in its evolving, screen-based form. Be there and get square-eyed!