13:00 | 1989 | DRAMA

Moxam’s short fiction, Candice’s Waltz, establishes the writer-director’s interest in the dynamics of the couple – here, that of two sisters. Jennifer, a social misfit and outsider, is concerned about her hospitalized sister, Candice. In a wheelchair and depressed, Candice barely speaks to anyone; her unrealized passion for dance is expressed through gazing at a videorecording. Jennifer has been keeping her own illness, recently diagnosed as leukemia, from her sister. Dance is used as a metaphor for escape (from illness, from family strife) early in the film when Jennifer reveals her illness to Candice. Candice’s response is brutal: she says she wants nothing more to do with her sister, and that she wishes to dance away from it all. By the film’s conclusion, however, dance transforms from a wish for escape to a vision of unity, when Jennifer takes Candice to a dance studio to watch a group of young female ballerinas perform. Dance, then, becomes an expression of interconnection and healing, a representation of care between two outsiders who begin to see each other as sisters and as people.

- Scott Birdwise (from No Man Can Define Me: The Films of Winston Washington Moxam)