Hanna Västinsalo

WOMBSONG

6’26” Finland 2018

A virtual dance experience. A pregnant dancer leads the audience to an imaginary world inside the womb. It’s a study of the nature of expecting life to be born and the pregnant body’s relationship to the harmony inside. It plays with the thought of fetus’s experience inside a dancing body and creates different feeling spaces. Baby’s first contact with a tightly embracing, big and mysterious being is as much a mystery as the dancer’s relationship to the budding life inside. The soundscape is created from the authentic sounds recorded through the dancer’s pregnant belly and dancer’s voice as well as the voice of the baby, who was born after the filming.

Hanna Västinsalo
She did her Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the University of Helsinki and studied film directing at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, CA. She has directed several short projects, a virtual reality dance project, a feature documentary about a Finnish entrepreneur and is in production with a documentary about Finnish disease heritage.