UK / France / 1997 / 102′ / English / French / Spanish / English Subtitles

The Tango Lesson is about a female filmmaker who discovers and falls in love with the tango. Between bouts of writing a screenplay for Hollywood—with which she grows increasingly dissatisfied— she places herself under the tutelage of Pablo, an Argentinian tango dancer living in Paris. As the lessons proceed, they strike a bargain: if he will make her a tango dancer, she will make him a movie star. He fulfills his part of the promise when they perform together in a mesmerizing show, but her attempt to create a film with Pablo in the passionate streets of Buenos Aires exposes the intricate tensions at the story’s heart—how do you follow when your very soul demands to lead?

Sally Potter weaves a genre-defying tale where a female filmmaker’s tango lessons become passages between different dimensions of reality. The contrast between her lush, technicolor screenplay and the stark black-and-white reality creates a visual portal where past dreams interweave with immediate experience. Like Delacroix’s “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”—a painting that haunts her journey—Sally grapples with eternal forces of surrender and control.