Adi Halfin's career got to a good start from her beginnings at Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem where she created shorts that got her to festivals around the world including Cannes and Berlinale. After cutting her teeth in the industry as a 1st AD to prominent Israeli directors, she went on to direct commercials and music videos in Europe and US. Based in Berlin, she also teaches dance film workshops with her creative approach to the format of dance film.

For a promotional video for Israeli contemporary dance group Batsheva Ensemble's new performance 'Home Alone', the brief was simple - include all dancers and rest is your creative freedom.

'I decided to do something I had never done before: find a location and only then create a  script. The name was “Home Alone”, so I knew that finding a “home” first would determine what form the video would take. And so it did.

Just down my street there was an abandoned textile factory from the 1920s, which I had been curious about for years. The day after I decided to first find the location, I saw the gate of the building open for the first time in 15 years. It felt like a sign, so I went in. The new owner of the place was there. He had just bought it and was about to renovate it. I told him about this project, and since he was a great fan of the Batsheva Dance Company, he gave us full access to the building.'

The location proved to be a perfect match with its broken staircases, dusty windows and large spaces full of light. Improvising with the dancers to work within the space intuitively, combining the director's intention with the work of cinematographer and dancers' incredible body work, the outcome works better than planned choreography that would otherwise take place.

I wanted to give a feel of my fascination with the dancers; their bodies, their movements and their ability to express emotions so accurately.

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'The idea was to surprise and mesmerize the audience, portraying dancers as the amazing creatures I saw them to be. 

I had a vision of revealing the house’s secrets through movement and discovering the dancers’ bodies through the house. I knew it had to be very passionate and somewhere in the back of my mind I had this idea of sex between two strangers with an intense chemistry between them. So it begins with a delicate sense of touching, revealing and feeling, and accelerates into something more and more intense, until that final breath at the end.'