Mia Slavenska, A Dancer's Odyssey Trailer
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Mia Slavenska was one of the most celebrated ballerinas of the 20th century and Croatia's greatest dancer. She was also my mother. She came of age during an explosive time of dance in an era that witnessed the birth of ballet modernism and modern dance. She danced through a dark time of Western history when powerful nationalist currents swept Western society inexorably into a second world war and spawned unthinkable cataclysms. Yet, while politics buffeted Mia Slavenska and those she loved, she insulated herself in her world of dance and art. She escaped the looming war in 1939 by immigrating to the United States with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

An expatriated artist, she pioneered her art form in these then-culturally virgin hinterlands and was one of a handful of artists who changed the face of American culture by introducing Americans to ballet. Acknowledged as the most beautiful and versatile of all her contemporaries, and as the greatest technician of her era, she was a pioneer who pre-echoed Balanchine's neo-classicism and a maverick who moved freely between classical ballet and modern dance. In 1952, when she danced the role of Blanche Dubois in the modern ballet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams called her his greatest Blanche.

Mia Slavenska died in Los Angeles in 2002, believing that she had been completely forgotten, not only in the United States, but also in her native Croatia. When I began, I thought that I was making this film because my mother asked me to tell her story. But over the past three years, as I have retraced her life journey, I realize that I am making this film because "once upon a time" Mia Slavenska danced.
-Maria Ramas