DIRECTORS:  Ian Iqbal Rashid
WRITERS:  Annmarie Morais
ACTORS:  Rutina Wesley, Clé Bennett, and Romina D'Ugo.
RELEASING COMPANY:  Paramount
SUGGESTED PRICE:  $21.99
 
REVIEWED BY:
Isabella Lucero
 
Raya (the incredibly beautiful and talented young actor Rutina Wesley) is forced to go back to the rough neighborhood portrayed in HOW SHE MOVE, because her parents are no longer able to afford the posh private school that she is attending.  Raya also carries an incredible sadness since her beloved step-dancing sister has just died of a drug overdose.  Raya is committed to her dream of continuing her education and going to medical school, helping her hard working parents, and getting out of her neighborhood, which is naturally filled with poverty, hopelessness, and drug addicts.
 
Thankfully the neighborhood is also chock full of young people who enjoy step-dancing, a dance form that originated in Africa and involves very athletic and rhythmic stomping, clapping, and exuberant dancing.  How Raya and her fellow dancers move includes step, break, and hip-hop dancing.  Our heroine’s ticket back to her posh school is to win a big step dance competition and this creates a hunger and a desire to step dance with the best of them.  Raya’s obstacles include a disapproving mother, sexism, machismo, and mean girls.
 
HOW SHE MOVE was shot in 16mm and played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. I thought the young cast did a terrific job and I really couldn’t tell who was an actor and who was a dancer, which is a testament to the double threat aspect of these performers.
 
Weaknesses include not really making the place a place.  I guess the distributors and producers felt the film had a better chance of making money in the US if you could not tell where these kids were dancing and living, which made it kind of funky because the lack of roots in a real live city, sucked something out of the layers of this film.  It was shot in Toronto, Canada, with the Caribbean immigrant community.   The filmmakers should have played this up, rather than trying to pass it off as some kind of African American urban tale in a city with no name.
 
Of course the joy of this film is the dance.  The dance sequences are amazing!  It is fun to watch simple dance offs between the lead and her angry girl rival as well as the grand finale dance sequences, with different crews.
 
This film has refreshingly very little references to drugs or violence and has its focus on dance and the merits of education. HOW SHE MOVE is fun to watch and also to say, a phrase demanding to be felt.
 
The extra features include a few mini documentaries on the characters of the film (there are a lot), the writer of the script, and since it is a dance film, how they trained.  All of the extra features are fun to watch, especially since you get to see the star of the movie smile (she is pretty serious and fierce throughout the movie).  All you have to do is check out the biceps and abs of the chicks in the film to know that they trained really hard, and indeed they trained for weeks, dancing for hours and hours. HOW SHE MOVE features the work of the choreographer Hi Hat.  
 
7 out of 10 binkies
 
Isabella Lucero is a writer, mother, cook, and gardener living in Tucson, Arizona.