Directed by Karim Coppola and premiered at Paris’ Bourse de Commerce, this five-part film series is a whirlpool of dance, fashion, music, and literature
From his creative agency Visore Lab to the independent films he produces under its offshoot, Visore X, Karim Coppola has long shown a knack for weaving different arts into unexplored territories and unspoken dialogues. Most recently, he has produced and directed a five-part film series, Storm and D, which puts dance and movement at the heart of his creative practice. The “anthology” of short films is a whirlpool of dance, fashion, music, and literature – a fitting mirror of the contemporary collusion of self, humanity, climate, and technology that the series explores.
The series’ title is a clever play on Sturm und Drang, the 18th-century German philosophical movement by which Coppola was inspired. “I started by understanding which key topics of Sturm und Drang, could be relevant for me and for the people around me,” he explains of the movement which expresses, among other things, uninhibited emotion. Movement, as a bodily negotiation between our inner and outer landscapes, was the perfect vehicle for the director to consider the fraying tapestry of our world. As he began writing, Coppola worked closely with Italian choreographer and movement director Gabriele Esposito, who helped build the project further. He then entrusted each film to talents including Charm La’Donna – the choreographer for Rosalía and Dua Lipa – and Daniele Sibili and Grace Lyell, who brought a vision that is “less pop, and almost soft and romanticised”.
Each of the five films has its own plot and creative direction, yet they are coherent in the very human questions they raise. Vanishing, the first in the series, considers drifted childhood friendships – that peculiar feeling when someone holds a part of you, yet is no longer in your life – and its impact on our adult selves. This film comes full circle in Last Surge, the final instalment, in which lost friendships cross in the chaos of adulthood. “It was crucial to show that you bring a lot of emotions, memories of childhood into your adult years, whether you want to or not,” explains Coppola. “That’s just how we are built as human beings.”
The other films oscillate between narrowing in on the human psyche and opening space for freedom of expression. For example, Within unfolds within the confined library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and “connects back to Sturm und Drang as it was a time when people started to realise that they can use their intellect and brain to question themselves,” reflects Coppola. Tide Between Us, on the other hand, was about “giving space and good energy to good people.” “This film is about expressing sexuality and sexual orientation without being too harsh on ourselves,” he says, “as I feel that as a queer director, I can be very harsh when it comes to my story.”
If the overarching vision is Coppola’s, he was careful to place the different creative disciplines in equal dialogue with each other. Alongside the stellar choreographers, stylist Marc Forné contributed with costume design and the original soundtrack was composed by the likes of Badius, Vallechi and Emil Zenko. “I think where it gets interesting is when there’s a fusion of different artists and disciplines without harming somebody else’s knowledge and skills,” says Coppola. “We should respect that and cook something together that makes sense for everyone.” The director was also adamant on paying the dancers a proper wage, in defiance of an industry where they are often underpaid or not paid at all.
Storm and D first previewed at Paris’ Bourse de Commerce “to make sure no one felt excluded as there is space there for different thinking, behaviours, and audiences.” And this is one of the extraordinary feats of the series: by combining so many different mediums, and so many different voices, Coppola opens many entry points to his work as well as the activism at the heart of it all. “What we need to keep in mind is that it’s not just about telling your story to the person that maybe shares a similar story,” he muses. “It’s really about telling it to people that have no clue about what your story is.”
Storm and D is available to stream now on Visore X now.
