The Fits

The Fits (2016)

Why fit in when you can dance to your own beat?

While training at the gym, 11-year-old tomboy Toni becomes entranced with a dance troupe. As she struggles to fit in, she finds herself caught up in danger as the group begins to suffer from fainting spells and other violent fits.

Date of release
2016-06-03
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (128)
Runtime
1h 12m
Genres
Drama
Director
Anna Rose Holmer

Casting

Interesting facts

The Fits is a 2015 American drama film directed by Anna Rose Holmer in her feature debut. The film tells the story of Toni, an 11-year-old tomboy who struggles to fit into a girls’ dance troupe as its members begin to suffer from an inexplicable epidemic of violent fits.

Production

The Fits was funded through grants from the Venice Biennale College-Cinema initiative, which supports "teams of directors and producers to make their first or second micro-budget audio-visual work". For a year before submitting an application, Director Anna Rose Holmer, alongside her co-writer and producer, Lisa Kjerulff, and editor and co-writer, Saela Davis, developed a Tumblr with ideas for the film.

While developing the script, Holmer was inspired by real-life stories of communities succumbing to fits of hysteria. She first became interested in historic cases of mass psychogenic illness and conversion disorder while producing Ballet 422 (2014). Examples of outbreaks of seizure-like attacks and uncontrollable spasms date back to the Middle Ages, but there are still cases of this occurring today.

After developing the first draft of the script, they began looking at dance teams. Holmer discovered the Cincinnati-based Q Kidz Dance Team on YouTube while she was still working on her pitch for the Venice Biennale College's program. Upon finding the Q Kidz, the writers adapted the story with them and their dance form in mind.

After casting the Q Kidz, they opened up casting for the lead amongst them. Royalty Hightower, who was nine years old at the beginning of the process and had already been dancing with the Q Kidz for 3 years, was cast as Toni. Holmer commented that Hightower had "this amazing power of listening and observing...she was really in tune with her body, in a way that is necessary to play Toni." Hightower worked in depth with movement consultant Celia Ro…

Saela Davis and Lisa Kjerulff, the film's co-writers, served other key positions in the film's crew, with Davis as an editor and Kjerulff as a producer. Of the film, Holmer said, “This had the most female department heads and most gender-balanced crew that I’ve ever worked with, and that came directly from the three of us being the key decision-makers and hirers.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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