By Zane Gordon-Bouzard

It’s a thrilling film to watch, and one gets a sense of a personal touch behind every frame.  This may be because it’s the first feature-length production from the University of Texas Film Institute, a unique program based in Austin that provides a more holistic experience of filmmaking than the average RTF class. “We’ve developed over 30 student-generated screenplays, and we chose this script based on it being the one that was the strongest from a storytelling point of view, and also something that we could make with our resources,” Alex Smith, the creative director of the UTFI and the film’s producer, said. “It was a combination of a beautiful story and something very cinematic that appealed to us.”

The UTFI functions as a long lesson in filmmaking for multiple students, covering every aspect of producing films from screenplay to portions of a final feature film. Students submit feature-length scripts at the beginning of the process, which are then narrowed down to a smaller cache of workable material, and each subsequent semester of students handles a different aspect of production of select portions of these scripts, from shooting scenes, to editing, to even making the film’s main titles. Along the way, students are guided by mentors and professionals with experience in making films. “We flip the model,” Smith said. “Instead of having students work as production assistants on professional movies, we have the professionals mentor them as they make [the students’] movie.”

The process not only serves as a long form exercise in filmmaking, but also as a way to instill confidence in student filmmakers.  For screenwriter Smith Henderson, who co-wrote the film with Jon Marc Smith as an adaptation of Marc Smith’s novel “Every Lost Girl”, the experience was nothing short of thrilling.  “For me to be able to take my first script that I tried to write and get a movie out of it … what schools do that?” Henderson asked. “Where do you get to do that? Nowhere. That’s kind of incredible.”

Michael Dolan, the film's director, is a UT Michener Center for Writers alumnus.

It’s fortunate that Henderson and Marc Smith’s script was given serious consideration, because without the gung ho attitude permeating the UTFI, “Dance With the One” may not have been made.

Michael Dolan, UT Michener Center for Writers alumnus, directs the film, which is a fantastic exercise in the escalation of tension. The story follows Nate (Gabriel Luna), a young Mexican-American pot dealer who wants nothing more than to escape with his girlfriend (Xochitl Romero) from his deadbeat father (Gary McCleery) and enroll his brother (Mike Davis) in a good school. Ever since the tragic death of his mother, both brother and father have been in a downward spiral of grief and rotten behavior, and Nate simply wants out. He works out a deal to hold premium drugs in exchange for the money he needs to accomplish this goal, only to be thwarted when the merchandise is stolen. What follows is a desperate search for the drugs, where each decision gets worse, eventually leading to bloodshed. “At the core it’s a beautiful story about loss,” Smith said. “It also captured a slice of Austin that really has yet to have been documented.”

Smith’s assessment is spot on. “Dance with the One” posits that beneath the veneer of Austin’s image as a laid-back town of college students and aging hippies is a layer of grit that people aren’t always willing to talk about. Most of the film appears to take place east of the highway, with occasional shots of the skyline looming in the background. Nefarious activity in Austin is often swept under the rug, or confined to geographic areas that some regard as “the wrong side of the tracks.” “Dance with the One” serves to humanize the people behind the mug shots that appear on the seven o’ clock news. We see a family damaged by the loss of a loved one, not the faceless perpetrators of crime. “It’s about people who either sink or swim,” Henderson said. “And the family in the film has definitely not made it. They’re sinking.”

The film is successful due to its commanding acting by every major player, especially Gary McCleery as Nate’s grief-stricken father. Henderson and Marc Smith’s writing visits familiar territory in terms of a crime story, but they add a unique take by making their characters so believably human. Each character has unique personality, something often absent from the typical drug thriller. Also, the film looks fantastic. For a movie funded largely by generous donations, various benefactors and University money, the photography is impeccable. It draws all of the terrible summer heat into the frame, making every drop of sweat visible, adding fantastically to the film’s intensity. All of these things are good, but the most important influence on the quality of the film is the community behind it.

“This is all generated out of UT, out of this sea of students,” Smith said. “Out of 50,000 students there’s got to be stellar talent in all of these weird areas of filmmaking, and we’re trying to identify and gather them.” Of all the people that worked on the film, Smith estimates that 90 percent were affiliated in some way with UT, a fact represented visually in the film’s credit roll where every person’s name involved with both the film and UT appears in burnt orange. Students were involved in all aspects of production from acting, to crew work, to editing. Not one person showed up late on set or balked at the prospect of working 12-hour days. “You’d see people getting excited about each other’s work,” Henderson said. “I don’t know how many people came up to [myself and Marc Smith] and said, ’Look at this set we just finished, isn’t this exactly what you pictured?’ And yeah, we were blown away.”

The product of all of this collaboration is a unique, well-made, entertaining film. “Dance with the One” is the ultimate result of the ambition of a community of people working together to create a piece of art, which ultimately reflects the collaborative nature of the medium itself. It’s a quality that really shines through in the film. The presence of a cooperative community of writers, actors, technicians, students and mentors is so indelibly infused with the film that one cannot help but feel as if they are watching a labor of love on screen. “It wasn’t some kind of Hollywood thing coming into town to use Austin and then head out of town,” Henderson said. “It’s about Austin, and it was created here. The idea is that it’s homegrown so that it grows the home.”