Celia Rowlson Hall’s Si Nos Dejan examines marriage through more experimental narrative technique, though to equally potent effect. Rowlson-Hall is a remarkably talented dancer and choreographer, and this training allows her to access a purely kinetic emotional language that’s riveting to watch. Her short film Prom Night, in which Rowlson-Hall re-enacts various iconic blondes, from Carrie to Madonna, screened at SXSW in 2011, and her latest Borscht entry follows similar themes. From a groom carrying his drowned bride on the beach, to a painfully awkward pole dance in a cheap motel, Rowlson-Hall’s scenes pulse with complex emotions, invoking anger and pathos at the same time. Rowlson-Hall has a lithe, delicate beauty on camera, but when she puts on a wig and high heel shoes it somehow strips these symbols of their glamour and throws it back in the viewer’s (voyeur’s?) face. The image of her perched like a terrified bird atop the stripper pole, only to screech down it in short bursts, is a potent visual distillation that accomplishes in a moment what takes feminist theory libraries of text to communicate. 

— Susanna Locascio

http://www.hammertonail.com/film-festivals/borscht-8-film-festival/