MACT’s Dr Eva Aymami Rene to premiere dance film at Cambridge Film Festival
Award-winning film explores movement through changing landscapes
As landscapes shift, erode, and disappear before our eyes, how do we learn to move with them rather than simply witness their loss? What forms of attention and belonging emerge when we encounter landscapes not as fixed settings but as living environments in continuous change?
Re-Shaping Landscapes is a short dance film by ARU senior lecturers Dr Eva Aymami Rene (Dance) and Josh Newman (Film). Premiering at the Cambridge Film Festival 2026, it explores our relationship with places undergoing environmental transformation, inviting audiences to reflect on how we inhabit and respond to changing worlds.
Bringing together artists from Cyprus, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, Re-Shaping Landscapes unfolds across four locations, from the Norfolk coast to urban Hong Kong, the Mediterranean landscape of Kyrenia, and the Swedish coastline. Through these diverse sites, it considers how bodies shape environments affected by erosion, flooding, and desertification.
The film draws on eco-performance studies, dance, and posthumanist philosophy to explore the relationships between bodies, places, and ecosystems. Through a shared choreographic framework informed by geographical coordinates, performers engage with site-specific environments, moving with elements such as wind, tide, sand, and stone. The choreographic research creates connections across distant locations while foregrounding the environmental conditions they share.
In doing so, it invites audiences to consider their relationship to places in transition and reflects on movement as a means of cultivating ecological awareness and connection across geographical and cultural borders.
As well as being selected for this year's Cambridge Film Festival, Re-Shaping Landscapes has received recognition further afield, having been selected for the Greensboro Dance Film Festival 2026 and won awards for Best Dance Film and Best Dance Short at several international film festivals.
Re-Shaping Landscapes will be screened at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on 25 and 29 October 2026 as part of the Cambridge Connections local short film strand.
You can find out more on the Re-Shaping Landscapes webpage and watch the trailer on YouTube.