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Body, Nature and Connection: PORTALS Comes to NewCinema/Shorts+
PORTALS, an experimental short by Kathi Hendrick, Benjamin Henretig and Cornelia Hodges, will be streaming on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
Made in the United States in 2024, the 8-minute, 32-second film uses movement, imagery and original music rather than dialogue to explore the relationship between the body, the natural world and our sense of connection to one another.
Described by its filmmakers as “a journey into interbeing,” PORTALS follows two journeys from disconnection towards reconnection. The film treats the body, nature and the heart as different entry points into that process, moving between inner experience and the external world while questioning how firmly the two can really be separated.
Rather than presenting those ideas through a conventional narrative, PORTALS relies on physical movement, visual composition and sound to communicate an experience that its creators regard as difficult to express through language alone.
From a Book to the Screen
The origins of PORTALS lie in the work of multimedia artist and poet Kathi Hendrick.
Hendrick is the author of PORTALS, a book combining poetry and visual art that became the starting point for the film. The project marks her first work in experimental filmmaking and extends an artistic practice already concerned with the relationships between body, imagination and the living world.
For Hendrick, making the film was an opportunity to translate those interests into movement, image and sound.
She describes her creative practice as a way of returning to the body, nature and forms of understanding that exist outside purely rational or verbal thought. PORTALS developed from a particular question: what might become possible if the body is experienced not as something separate from the surrounding world, but as a way of entering more deeply into it?
That idea provides the conceptual foundation of the film.
“I’m fascinated by the multidimensional nature of life,” Hendrick says, “by the ways our inner worlds are continually reflecting and entangling with the worlds around us.”
Exploring the Boundaries of the Self
The concept of “interbeing” is central to PORTALS.
The film considers whether familiar divisions — between self and other, human beings and nature, or inner and outer experience — are as fixed as they appear.
Through choreography, imagery, poetry and sound, Hendrick wanted to create a space in which those boundaries could become more porous. The intention is not to provide an intellectual explanation of interconnectedness, but to explore whether it can instead be communicated as a physical and sensory experience.
The film therefore places particular importance on the body.
For Hendrick, becoming more attentive to physical experience can provide a route towards recognising our connection with something larger than ourselves. She also connects that idea to broader questions about how people relate to one another and to the environment.
“How do we transform the ways we see, feel, and relate in order to create a thriving world for everyone?” she asks in her director's statement.
Hendrick sees art as one possible means of examining that question, particularly because it can disrupt familiar habits of thought and create space for different ways of perceiving and experiencing the world.
Three Artists, Different Disciplines
The collaborative nature of PORTALS brings together three artists whose backgrounds span visual art, filmmaking, music and dance.
Hendrick works across poetry, movement, imagery, sound and experiential practice. Alongside her artistic work, she facilitates projects concerned with embodiment, creativity, transformation and what she describes as regenerative approaches to life and relationships.
Co-director Benjamin Henretig is a multidisciplinary artist and Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Taos, New Mexico. A Stanford alumnus in Film & Media Studies and Persuasive Technology, Henretig has worked extensively in short-form documentary filmmaking as well as music and composition.
His previous work includes the documentary Crossing Bhutan, which followed a journey across Bhutan on foot and by bicycle while examining the country's pursuit of Gross National Happiness. His projects also include Let Science Speakand Building Web3. As a musician and classically trained pianist, Henretig combines filmmaking with an interest in composition, meditation and the use of sound.
The third co-director, Cornelia Hodges, comes primarily from dance and choreography. She studied modern dance and dance on camera at the University of Virginia and later worked with the Dance on Camera Festival in New York and the San Francisco Dance Film Festival.
Hodges has continued to perform and choreograph while also working as an advocate for community arts in Virginia.
Those different disciplines are particularly relevant to a film that depends on movement, image and music rather than spoken language.
An Experimental Film Without Dialogue
PORTALS contains no dialogue and requires no subtitles. Its ideas are instead communicated through the interaction of bodies, environments, imagery and an original musical score.
That approach allows the film to remain deliberately open. Rather than telling viewers exactly how its images should be understood, the filmmakers use the two journeys at its centre to explore a transition from isolation towards a greater sense of connection.
The result sits somewhere between dance film, visual art and experimental cinema.
It is also closely connected to Hendrick's broader approach to art-making. She describes creating art as entering the unknown — a process that requires giving up predetermined answers and paying attention to what emerges through the work itself.
In PORTALS, that process becomes both the method and the subject.
Beginning Its Festival Journey
PORTALS has begun receiving recognition on the festival circuit.
The film received an Honourable Mention at Hollywood New Directors in 2026 and is being featured by Dance Filmmaking in fall 2026.
Its inclusion in dance-film contexts reflects the importance of choreography and embodied movement to the project, while its combination of film, visual art, poetry and music gives the short a broader experimental character.
Coming to NewCinema/Shorts+
PORTALS will now be available worldwide through NewCinema/Shorts+ on Whush.
Although its subject is abstract, the film begins from a relatively direct proposition: that the separation people experience between themselves, other people and the natural world may not be as absolute as it sometimes feels.
Hendrick, Henretig and Hodges approach that idea through their respective disciplines, using movement, imagery and music rather than conventional dialogue or exposition.
For Hendrick, the film ultimately represents an attempt to give form to something difficult to articulate — the possibility that beneath an experience of separation lies a deeper field of connection.
PORTALS (United States, 2024), directed by Kathi Hendrick, Benjamin Henretig and Cornelia Hodges, runs 8 minutes 32 seconds and will stream worldwide on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
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