Surrender 2023

Directed by Jenkin van Zyl

Surrender follows a visitor to the P.E.E.P. hotel, GRACE, as they compete with four other couples at the hotel’s ballroom in increasingly bewildering tournaments that play with the limitations and expansiveness of the body. The film traces phenomenons of 20th century dance marathons––gruelling endurance competitions wherein couples competed for hundreds of hours in almost-non-stop dancing––with the cryptid lore of the rat king and Japanese love hotels. Here the dance floor variously becomes a cell, a nightclub, the belly of a whale, a courtroom, a treadmill and a beating heart–a space for negotiating community, desire and risk, but also to seek out victory, exhaustion and The End.