What the Body Knows

This is what the uncertainty is for

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This is the second of two posts published today. The first is Decidedly Uncertain. You don’t have to read them in order. But they were written that way.

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Dear Curious Minds,

Next Monday I’ll be at Doc Edge Pitch, an industry event for New Zealand’s Oscar-qualifying international documentary festival. I will be helping a documentary get pitched to funders, commissioners, and broadcasters who can determine whether it reaches the world.

The film is called The Eternal City. The producer is Paula Whetu Jones. Yes, that Paula, the producer of The Doctor’s Wife.

Before that room hears about how I came to help with it, and what it means for Entangled Curiosities from this point, I want you to. Thank you for being here. I appreicate you.

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John didn’t arrive in Taiwan to shoot this story. Yes, he is a film director with his gear, so he could technically shoot anything. But what he captured is clear evidence of something that could have only evolved through trust, friendship, and the kind of unexpected conversations people have only with someone they’ve stopped thinking of as a filmmaker. In his own words, what ended up on film was “a gift”.

When Paula invited me to watch the trailer, I felt the authenticity of that word. I imagine she expected me to appreciate the obvious quality of the footage. But I’m not sure whether she expected this to rattle my grieving soul. To the point I’d have to quit my day job.

The Eternal City follows RIDT — a Taiwanese dance group that includes dancers living with physical disabilities and move with wheelchairs. But that does not do the story justice as a descriptor.

Because this film revolves around what happens when limitation meets creativity and, on the other side, finds a completely different kind of freedom. One of the dancers, Arwen, said it better than I can:

“When you have too much freedom, you lose it . The direction you move might be what you’re already used to. But when limitation exists, you can actually expand beyond it. Because of that limitation, you can discover and develop a completely new state of the body. So I don’t think we should call it a limitation, it’s having more freedom. It’s about creation.”

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One of the dancers is Jiahun. After a traumatic brain injury, she continues to dance. In her own body and in her own way. We might immediately assume limitations as we watch her discover her new boundaries. But her story is ongoing, fully, on her own terms.

I will do my best to articulate why that matters to me, because it’s almost beyond my own cognitive register. But my body knows it. Somewhere deep in my gut and heart and brain, filled with loving grief.

My brother Mike died suddenly in 2023 from a brain haemorrhage that nobody expected for a 32 year old man withouth any medical conditions. When I got the phone call, silently drove for two hours and walked into that emergency room, I could not stop my brain from anticipating the range of what I was about to see. Many nervous scenarios played out in my head until I walked into that room.

My creativity limitation certainly failed me because it didn’t include him being pronounced brain dead for me to decide if we would consider organ donation.

For a long time, I found myself ruminating on many parallel universes of what-ifs as a grieving person does. It was either helpful or unhelpful to have postgraduate-level neuroscience knowledge and to be nerdy enough to have been following advances in that field. Because you end up wondering what continuity of his life could have been with those what-ifs, even when you know there is no rational point to that rumination.

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Mike did not survive. He died. And his death allowed a continuation of life because four people received organ transplants. His generosity and legacy continue in different bodies.

Jiahun survived. Her story continues in her own body, through her own dance. It is too soon for us to know what that means for her and her family. But I daresay the story she is going to tell through her dance will take the form that the injury co-creates rather than merely diminishes.

These are not the same story and I don’t want to flatten them into one. Jiahun is not a symbol of what Mike might have been. Nor should she be defined by what she was before, and I refuse to watch her through that lens — the able-bodied dancer she once was as a shadow over the dancer she is now.

What hit me somewhere past thinking when I watched the footage John and Paula had shared, newly made friends that we all are, was not exploitation of loss. So far, I can only articulate it as witnessing a way a person can move beyond what society or our own perception has decided is the boundary of what we can do. The way limitation, refused on its own terms, becomes something else entirely.

That is not specific to Jiahun. It is not specific to Taiwan. It crossed every distance and every ethnic difference between us without asking permission, which is exactly what the best stories do.

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Paula Whetu Jones has spent her career proving people wrong about everything people told her she couldn’t. Filming a cardiac surgeon and his wife who saved and made hundreds of Palestinian children dance across two decades because they refused to let retirement be the end of their story. She defied the odds and continued her successful creative career after becoming a wheelchair user; including creating Spinal Destination, a comedy-drama drawn directly from that experience. Because why stop a career with a pity-party and tragedy out of material that contains this much dark comedy? She did not make those films despite being told no. She made them through it.

What an extraordinary thing, then, that Aotearoa gets invited to be part of a project of Taiwanese dancers that trusted a Māori producer using a wheelchair, a Kiwi director who became a friend, and an angry, nerdy, griefy Korean New Zealander to carry it to the rest of the world. I don’t think any of us could have planned that particular combination. But I think the story knew what it was doing.

I first got involved with Paula’s work when I decided to help organise a fundraising screening for The Doctor’s Wife. Because I believed the story needed more people to see it. A year and a bit later, after friendships that formed over tears and laughter, have led to next Monday’s room at Doc Edge Pitch.

This is the first of several projects that Entangled Curiosities will formally undertake in the film and screen sphere. I could not have designed a more full-circle beginning to do it with the people I got to know.

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Here is the ask. I’m not going to apologise for it.

The Eternal City has 12 days left on Boosted, an arts crowdfunding platform. We are grateful for the generous match funding from E Tū Toi. They are matching every dollar donated dollar-for-dollar up to $8,000, which means hitting the crowdfunding goal will see us get $16,000 in total.

Times are tough. But I don’t feel awkward about this ask. I feel audaciously clear about it. You are not being invited to be charitable for a regrettable gadget nobody acutally needs. You are being invited to help be part of an incredible community of people and create your own small part of the legacy with their story. That is something we can all proudly and collectively, hold long after the campaing closes.

The campaign closes in 13 days. I am excited to see how Aotearoa gets behind this project. I know the story needs to reach the world.

So, join us by donating today so we can take the Eternal City to the rest of the world.

Stella

p.s. If you can’t donate: please share this post. You can also copy and paste the Boosted link to share the page. Aotearoa is a small community that knows people who know people. So if you have connections with people who believe in the power of storytelling and human dignity, and who can make the right introductions and provide support for documentary funding, festival programming, or Taiwanese diaspora communities who should know this film needs funding to finish production, please put them in touch with me.