The Fits

Toni is eleven and trains at boxing in a gym with her older brother. On the other side of the building there is a dance team; the girls train together, go to competitions and have an order of their own. Toni wants to cross over and joins them. Then the girls begin having fits one by one: they fall, they shake, and then they come round. Nobody can find the cause. The members of the team start talking about it not as something frightening but as a passage. Anna Rose Holmer directs. Royalty Hightower plays Toni. It was shot in a real recreation centre in Cincinnati and the dance team is real; most of the cast are children from that team. The narrative gives no explanation. Whether the fits have a medical cause is not said, and the film does not build it as a mystery either; it leaves it as it is. The subject is the crossing into adolescence and the wish to belong to a group. The fit becomes an experience the girls share, and Toni waits her turn. It runs seventy five minutes with very little dialogue; the telling proceeds through movement, sound and looking. It is a small first feature and was counted among the most striking works of its year on the festival circuit. Who it is for: viewers who like formally experimental independent film and narratives of adolescence. Who it is not for: there is no plot, the film answers no questions, and a viewer expecting an explanation will be left unsatisfied.