STORIED BODIES

A short film by Gabriela Hirt

Trailer

Sinopsis

Storied Bodies is an experimental short film that brings visual art to life through dance, exploring intergenerational trauma and colonial legacies as barriers to connection. Two painted figures awaken from an abstract painting, embarking on an emotional, sometimes disorienting journey through isolation, chaos, and conflict. As they confront the personal and collective histories embedded in their bodies, their interaction reveals both the forces that separate and connect them. The film offers a poetic meditation on identity, trauma, memory, and human relation.

About the film

Storied Bodies is an experimental short film that brings together cinematography, dance, sound, and expanded painting. Two dancers, Tabea Antonacci and Marie Elise Hufnagel, translate complex emotions and histories from a large piece of wall art into movement, suggesting that if trauma is embodied and passed along in the body, why wouldn’t resistance and resilience be as well?

The project was made in an entirely improvisational and collaborative process. Each artist contributed with deep personal investment; story, movement, score, and image evolved in a horizontal exchange. Structure emerged through repetition and responsiveness, allowing the work to remain fluid and open.

Working with fragmentation and abstraction, Storied Bodies approaches the body as a site of inscription; a place where memory and history live on and are carried out through gesture as well as spatial relation rather than through plot.

Sound plays a central role in the work’s formation. The score by composer Hameed Al Saeed (Bahrain) is interwoven with sounds recorded during the making of the large-scale painting featured in the film — brushstrokes, cleaning noises, moments of erasure — alongside spoken excerpts from Gabriela Hirt’s poem “Present Ancestor”, read by Wiradjuri poet and feminist writer Alison J. Barton. Her voice enters the film not as narration, but as a material presence. Some of Alison’s own words are physically inscribed (by herself) onto the painted surface, folding poetry and image into a shared field of memory.

Through this process, Storied Bodies reflects on how inherited trauma and colonial legacies live on in the body — not as fixed narratives, but as sensations and traces that surface in emotions, behaviour, and relation.