These Violent Delights: 2026 SF Dance Film Festival

The 2026 SF Dance Film Festival presents a vivid retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” brought to life by Scottish Ballet.

TICKETS: https://sfdancefilmfest.org/fall-festival-2026/these-violent-delights/

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
These Violent Delights reimagines “Romeo and Juliet” as a kaleidoscopic journey of queer belonging, defiance, and self-discovery. Juliet awakens in The Apothecary, surrounded by the wreckage of a story already ended — daggers, spilled poison, Romeo’s body — before the film rewinds into a fevered hallucination that blurs memory and nightmare, cinema and dance.

Produced by the Scottish Ballet and directed by Oscar Sansom and Christopher Hampson, the film reworks Shakespeare’s tragedy into bold, unapologetically modern territory, from the mirrored dining rooms of the Capulets and Montagues to a queer club reclaimed from an abandoned building, presided over by drag sisters Laurence and Giovanna. Featuring choreography by Julia Cheng, Morgann Runacre-Temple, Myles Thatcher, Sophie Laplane, Nicholas Shoesmith, and Andrea Azzari, and starring Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and Ishan Mahabir-Stokes, the film pulls one of theater’s most iconic tragedies into vivid new form.

Followed by a live Q&A with director Christopher Hampson, CBE (Scottish Ballet) and co-choreographer Myles Thatcher (San Francisco Ballet), moderated by Lane Sugata (Chief Executive Officer at San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus).