Only When I Dance

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Tears stream down young Isabela’s innocent face as the slender, gazelle-like girl is told she needs to slim down even more if she wants to turn her passion into a career.

Like Isabela, Irlan’s strictly regimented days leave him no time to be an average teenager.

Isabela and Irlan are ballet dancers. And though they have the talent to succeed, they do not look like the other dancers.

Ballet has long been the rarified and elitist domain of the white upper class, but these two black high schoolers from Rio de Janeiro’s working class favelas are determined to succeed in this physically and emotionally demanding discipline.

Director Beadie Finzi’s inspiring documentary trails the dancers and their tough-love mentor from Brazil to New York during one critical, competition-fueled year in their lives.

Finzi joins entertainment editor Amanda Palmer and the FPS audience for a Q&A about her inspiring and emotional new documentary.

Jane Campion

Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in Jane Campion’s Bright Star

She might be the most celebrated female film director of all time.

Jane Campion, the only female winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and one of only three women nominated for a Best Director Oscar, carries a weight of expectation with every new film. And her latest, Bright Star, about the romance between doomed poet John Keats and his muse, Fanny Brawne, lives up to the hopeful anticipation.

Campion and her stars, Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, who play Brawne and Keats, speak to FPS about this almost universally praised new film.

Air Doll

Hirokazu Koreeda’s improbable tale of an inflatable doll – Air Doll

A comic book about a full-sized, inflatable doll coming to life might not sound like the inspiration for one of this year’s saddest, sweetest romances.

But one of Japan’s most interesting directors, Hirokazu Koreeda, has achieved the improbable with Air Doll.

Koreeda talks to FPS about his absorbing adaptation of a Japanese manga, or comic book, and about his much-admired past films like Afterlife and Nobody Knows.

PA-RA-DA

Marco Pontecorvo’s PA-RA-DA

Marco Pontecorvo, the son of the hugely admired director Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers), has made a moving new feature based on the true story of a French Algerian clown who visited Bucharest, Romania in the early 1990s and was so moved by the plight of thousands of street children that he decided to set up a circus school for them.

FPS meets Pontecorvo and previews his film.

This episode of The Fabulous Picture Show can be seen from Thursday, September 24, at the following times GMT: Thursday: 0600, 1630; Friday: 0130, 0830; Saturday: 1130, 2330; Sunday: 0630, 2030; Monday: 1430; Tuesday: 1930; Wednesday: 0300.