Stay Up: A Documentary on Trauma, Dance & Healing Through Movement - Film Review

Stay Up tells the story of Mariam Doumbia, a young dancer from Mali who finds in dance a path to healing after a childhood marked by repeated sexual abuse. Forced to leave her home country, Mariam relocates to Burkina Faso, where she enrols in a dance school in Ouagadougou. There, through movement and choreography, she begins to confront her past, preparing not only for her final performance but also for a deeper reckoning with the traumas she carries within her. The power of this documentary seems to lie in its ability to turn the language of the body into a form of storytelling.

Dance is not just an art form here, in fact it becomes a way to process pain, reclaim agency, and give shape to emotions that words might fail to express. Her body, once the site of violence, becomes the space where healing and self-affirmation take place. At the same time, the film gestures toward broader realities: the burden of familial expectations, economic pressures, the need to migrate in order to survive and to begin again. Mariam’s personal story is deeply intertwined with collective structures, especially those that shape the experiences of women whose bodies are too often sites of control and abuse, but who nonetheless find ways to resist and reimagine their futures. Mariam’s pregnancy adds another layer to the narrative: not as a conclusion, but as a continuation of her journey. Motherhood appears as a threshold, a moment charged with possibility and reflection. Stay Up emerges as an essential and moving work, centered on the body, memory, and the unwavering desire to take back the narrative and build something new.

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• Refugees