Dancing with Horses at the New Jersey Film Festival

by Catherine Liu

originally published: 09/09/2026

In Imprinted, the film opens with a dancer saying she learned early to be resilient, to keep moving, always anticipating the next moment, and that the resilience distanced her from her heart. Eighty minutes later, the film ends in stillness. Everything between those two points is the route from one to the other, and the route runs through horses.

JoAnna Mendl Shaw is a choreographer who has spent years developing work for dancers and horses together, and I came to the film expecting the horses to be the subject. They turn out to be closer to the method. What the film is actually about is how a person learns to listen when the other party has no words and no interest in being managed.

The practical detail won me over early. A horse dictates the timing, the effort flow, and the placement of your feet, so the dance becomes a situation of necessity rather than a set of decisions. The dancers describe having to be interesting to the horse first of all, and figuring out how to do so when they cannot. They describe the exercise as a proposition, asking whether they can be in this space, then asking what the horse thinks of a particular movement. I keep returning to that as a description of any communication that works.

The section that convinced me the film is serious comes about halfway through, when the work stops going well. A dancer loses the thread with a horse, gets busy and reactive, and reaches the point where she says she is overloaded and cannot continue. She says she had an emotional reaction for the first time in a long time, which surprised her. What follows is the reason coming into view. She anticipates, she gets ahead, and stillness is hard for her. A film about listening earns a great deal by including someone who fails to listen and by holding that failure long enough to be uncomfortable.

The moment that ties it together arrives soon after. The horse Roxy used to constantly anticipate, always getting ahead of her person instead of being with her, and that changed over the last few years. The dancer hears this and recognizes herself in it, and then the film reaches the thing it has been building toward, which is that the lesson being taught to the dancer is the same lesson the horse already learned. The insight emerges during a working session and feels more impactful when it comes from someone who did not seek it out.

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Something else I responded to personally. The dancers talk about traveling where you do not speak the language, where the only way to communicate is through the body, and about being able to say everything you want without uttering a word. The film treats physical language as a full language rather than a substitute for one, and it holds that position long enough to make the case.

What surrounds all of this is a film paying close attention to where the work happens. The film photographs the woods, the grass fields, the barn, and the open wild spaces around the horses with the same care it gives the people, and it takes its feeling from the places as much as from the dancers. The music sits with it, and by the end, the landscape reads as part of the method. These are animals whose sense of space is the whole point, so a film that keeps showing you the space they move through is making an argument through its look.

The film ends where it has been heading the whole time. Someone says that we find it hard to quiet our brains and just be in our sensing body, and that this might be the state of stillness. The last thing said is about not wanting anything and not trying to achieve anything, just being. For a film that opened on resilience as a distance from the heart, that is a full distance traveled, and the horses are what carried it across.

Imprinted screens at the New Jersey Film Festival on Sunday, September 13, 2026 – – Online for 24 Hours on this date and In-Person at 5PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901!
Producer/Director Martina Casas and choreographer JoAnna Mendl Shaw will be at the screening to do a Q+A with the in-person audience!
Get more info and buy tickets here.

The 45th Bi-annual New Jersey Film Festival will be taking place between September 4-October 4, 2026. The Festival will be a hybrid as we will be presenting it online as well as doing select in-person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. VOD start times are at 12 Midnight Eastern USA. Each General Admission Ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in-person shows when both are offered. We will also be offering an Audio-Visual Concert featuring Hanging Coats and Lawns as well as two FREE Filmmaking Workshops! The in-person screenings, the filmmaking workshops and the AV Concert will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at 1PM, 5PM or 7PM on their show date. General Admission Ticket=$15 Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$100; In-Person Only Student Ticket=$10 Per Program. The Filmmaking Workshops are FREE and open to the public but have limited seating and require advance registration. To register email us at [email protected]