The Sea
- Knowbox dance
- Jul 30
- 3 min read
kNOwBOX dance Film Festival 2025
Official Selection Film Spotlight
The Sea (2024)
Directed by Douglas Rosenberg
📍 USA ⏱ 64 minutes
The Sea is a 60-minute black-and-white film shot on Fårö Island, exploring aging, solitude, and community through untrained performers in the haunting landscape that once inspired Ingmar Bergman.
Film Description
The Sea, is a 60 minute black and white film conceived and directed by Douglas Rosenberg Filmed completely on location at the edge of the Baltic Sea. The Sea was shot in the footsteps of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman in a landscape that inspired the project on the island of Fårö, an extraordinary place that was Bergman’s home as well as the place in which he shot some of his most important and compelling films. The Sea explores the nature of aging and the relationship of men of my age to the landscape, to solitude and to community with a cast of largely untrained performers who come from the areas surrounding the island of Fårö.
Meet The Makers
Our theme this year is "Bodies in Motion: A Dance Film Celebration" to move beyond borders and dance through time. Telling stories only the body can speak. How do you think your film relates to this theme?
The Sea explores aging and the intimate relationships between men in their third age. Featuring a cast of predominantly untrained performers from the island of Gotland, Sweden, The Sea reflects on camaraderie and the ways life’s experiences leave their marks on our bodies, expressed through movement and the passage of time.
Biography
Douglas Rosenberg (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) is the Vilas Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an artist and a theorist working with performance, video, installation whose work has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years in museums, festivals, galleries and elsewhere. He is the author of Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image, published by Oxford Press and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, for which he was awarded the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research. He is a founding editor of The International Journal of Screendance. His work has been supported by numerous grants and awards including, the NEA, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Soros Foundation, the MAP Fund in New York and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video. He is most recently the recipient of the Creative Arts Award. Recent exhibitions and screenings of his films include Limerick City Gallery of Art, Scotland Kunsthaus, Graz, Austria, and Lincoln Center, New York and at le Festival Ciné-Corps de Paris in 2018. His commissioned public art project, Monumental Gestures was on view in Decatur, Georgia through 2022 and his most recent film, Song of Songs, is touring internationally and was recently screened at the Ingmar Bergman Center in Fårö, Sweden. His newest film project shot on the Island of Fårö in Sweden is called, The Sea. His most recent book (2024) is, Staring at the Sky, Essays on Art and Culture, published by Korpen Press.
Film Credits
Director: Douglas Rosenberg, DIrector of cinematographer/editor: Paul Wu, Choreography: David Dorfman, Benno Voorham, Douglas Rosenberg, Producer: Andreas Nordblom, Sound: Bjorn van Weiden
Festival Screenings/Awards
Art Film Spirit Awards, Berlin Kiez (Best Feature Film Award). KNOwBOX Dance Film Festival, Cinevox Dance FIlm Festival, Dumbo Film Festival, Lisboa Indie Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival, Dance Film Festival, Prague, Wunderground Film Festival
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