There are some short films where knowing the story behind them completely changes how you experience what unfolds on screen. Dance with Me is one of them.
Written and directed by Nicholas Paskhover, the film was inspired by his grandparents, Boris and Maya. Boris was just nine years old when he was sent to the Pechora concentration camp in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. He survived, but decades later, dementia began pulling those childhood experiences back to the surface. For Paskhover, Dance with Me became a way of honouring not only his grandfather and everything he survived, but his grandmother, who had to watch the man she’d spent more than fifty years with gradually forget her.
That knowledge gives this 15-minute short an incredible emotional weight.
Elya Baskin plays Sasha, an elderly Holocaust survivor living with dementia, while Laraine Newman plays his wife, Anya. As Sasha’s condition progresses, the boundaries between the life he has now and the horrors buried within his childhood begin to disappear. Anya can see the man she loves standing directly in front of her, but reaching him becomes increasingly difficult as memories from another lifetime consume his reality.
What I really loved about Dance with Me is that Paskhover doesn’t treat dementia simply as a device designed to make the audience cry. There’s something much more frightening happening underneath.
Sasha isn’t merely forgetting.
He’s remembering.
Experiences buried for decades suddenly become immediate again. The past isn’t something Sasha can safely look back upon; in his mind, it can become the present. That gives the film an increasingly unsettling quality because we begin experiencing the uncertainty alongside him. What is happening now? What happened decades ago? And, more painfully, who does Sasha believe is standing in front of him?
Elya Baskin is exceptional.
There’s such vulnerability in his performance because Sasha can change without the film needing to announce it. Confusion becomes fear, fear can become suspicion, and occasionally you catch glimpses of the man Anya has known and loved for decades. Baskin never needs to exaggerate those moments. His performance feels restrained and painfully human.
But Laraine Newman affected me just as much.
Anya is arguably the emotional heart of the film because she’s experiencing a completely different kind of loss. The person she loves hasn’t disappeared physically. He’s right there. Yet parts of their life together are gradually becoming inaccessible to him.
There’s something devastating about that idea.
How do you process being forgotten by someone you’ve shared most of your life with? How do you continue reassuring someone when they may no longer recognise that you’re the person who has been standing beside them for decades?
Newman captures that beautifully. There’s love in Anya, but also exhaustion, fear and tremendous patience. The film doesn’t romanticise what she’s experiencing. Loving somebody doesn’t suddenly make caring for them easy, and Dance with Me understands the difference.
Paskhover also makes excellent use of Sasha’s past without allowing the historical elements to overwhelm the relationship at the centre of the film. The period sequences aren’t there simply to explain his trauma. They show why memories formed during childhood could remain so deeply embedded within him that, decades later, they become impossible to separate from the present.
Knowing that Paskhover drew upon his own family’s history makes those scenes even more affecting. His grandfather rarely spoke about what happened to him, and Paskhover has said he always intended to sit down and record his story but never did before dementia began taking hold. There’s an enormous amount of regret, love and reflection behind this film, but none of it feels exploitative.
Instead, it feels like preservation.
Perhaps that’s what stayed with me most about Dance with Me. Paskhover couldn’t make the recording of his grandfather that he’d once imagined, but through filmmaking he has created something else: a story inspired by the memories that survived within his family.
The cinematography, production design and music all contribute to the film’s gradual transition from intimate relationship drama into something considerably more unsettling. Importantly, that tonal shift never feels forced. We begin alongside Anya and Sasha as a couple and slowly find ourselves trapped inside the uncertainty that has entered their relationship.
For a film running only around 15 minutes, Dance with Me carries an extraordinary amount of emotional weight. It deals with the Holocaust, dementia, childhood trauma, caregiving, memory and decades of marriage without feeling overcrowded because everything ultimately comes back to one simple relationship.
Two people who have spent a lifetime together.
And one of them is beginning to forget.
Dance with Me is a powerful and deeply personal short film anchored by two wonderful performances from Elya Baskin and Laraine Newman. Nicholas Paskhover has taken an incredibly painful chapter of his own family history and transformed it into something intimate, unsettling and ultimately filled with love.
Because memories can disappear.
But what those memories meant to us can be much harder to erase.
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