Steve Zahn knew the dance competition world because he’d lived in the parking lot version of it. The waiting, the props, the kids in sparkly costumes bending in ways that made anatomy feel more like a polite suggestion. That all fed into She Dances, the new independent film he co-wrote and stars in with his daughter Audrey Zahn, who grew up in competitive dance and made her feature debut playing a fictional daughter in a story that got pretty close to the real one. “It was really beautiful and it was horrible and it was funny and it was dumb,” Steve told me. “It was all the things.”
But the movie didn’t go for the easy dance-parent satire. Steve said they were “void of any cynicism,” and instead made a road movie about a father and daughter carrying grief they didn’t quite know how to say out loud. They shot it in Kentucky, pulled in their actual family and dance community, and made what Steve called “an independent American cinematic film for families.”
Steve Zahn & Audrey Zahn on Dance Dads, Kentucky Film, and Making She Dances a Family Affair
