A National Film Board of Canada Production

A female silhouette, sketched with fine white lines, disintegrates. A few bars ring out from “Loca”—a classic tune from the golden age of Argentinean tango.

The spellbinding music sweeps the woman into a dance. As she whirls, a duo forms, their bodies intertwined in black and white. Their complete abandonment to the music is expressed in abundant waves of ink, creating a mesmerizing visual spectacle.

Long synopsis

A female silhouette, sketched with fine white lines, disintegrates. A few bars of “Loca”—a classic tune from the golden age of Argentinean tango—ring out. The spellbinding music sweeps the woman into a dance. As she whirls, a duo forms, their bodies intertwined in black-and-white geometric fusion. Their complete abandonment to the music is expressed in abundant waves of ink, creating a mesmerizing visual performance.

With a mastery of both dance and animation, Véronique Paquette channels the essence of tango through evocative imagery of bodies that are equally furtive and powerful. We feel a sense of energy unfolding in these spontaneous movements, and the outpourings of a soul in the process of rebuilding itself. Paquette artfully marries traditional and digital techniques, using a palette knife to turn ink on paper into a liberating dance, opening the way to a world of infinite possibilities.

Two-liner

Through the energy of tango, a woman finds a path to freedom. A mesmerizing visual performance created with waves of ink and black-and-white geometric shapes.

One-liner

A woman finds the path to freedom through the energy of tango.

Argentinean tango came into my life 20 years ago, at the same time as animation. Very quickly, I clued in to the multisensory and multidimensional aspects of this dance. Tango is a special world, an intersection of bodily interaction and identity-shaping imagination.

The two art forms developed and evolved in parallel in my life. Each has allowed me to question myself at different times. Each has been a school, a prison, a liberating force, a jungle, a home. As I gradually became proficient in one and the other, this organically led me to want to express myself more freely, to create. That emerging need gave rise to a new quest: to deconstruct what I knew and reconstruct it in my image, through a work combining animation and tango.

I’ve always seen Argentinean tango as a dance that forces us to confront our vulnerability and delve into our innermost selves. In creating LOCA, to approach the tango from a personal perspective and convey to the audience the movement, energy and profound connections within me, I made ink applied with a palette knife my ally. That process allowed spontaneous, lively gestures to prevail over precision and control, and the result was more intuitive, a purer form of expression. So this dancing ink manifested a pulse, an unmistakable geometry, a new breath.

I worked very closely with a choreographer and a duo of tangueros, shooting reference images that prompted me to update my script. From those motion captures, I then distilled the essential movements and interpreted them freely. Everything—from the play of angles and curves to the interpretation of the music, the decision to use black and white and the choice of techniques—was meant to convey the inner experience of the female character.

For the danced portion, I was determined to use a classical piece that every tango dancer would recognize, and with which they would already have a certain emotional affinity. Superimposed on my inks, Juan d’Arienzo’s “Loca” was a revelation, in its rhythms, its title as well as its beat. In light of the prominent role given to the bandoneón (an iconic instrument in tango) in the piece, I also decided to work with a bandoneón-ist. The instrument was integral to the sound-design process for the film, from the sound effects to the original music used at the end, like a breath of life accompanying the character throughout her quest.

This short film is both an homage to the tango of Argentina and an invitation to heed our intuition, our natural movement.