Dancing With My Father

An intimate family portrait of how adult love is often shaped by what a child learns at home. “My father loves to dance,” says filmmaker, writer, and NYU Professor, Marcia Rock. Dance is the correct metaphor for the evasive and distant relationship with her father, a dance seemingly replicated in her marriage and adult relationships. Delving into a complex emotional genealogy, she explores her childhood in suburban Cleveland and travels to her grandmother’s childhood in rural Slovakia to uncover thwarted hopes, misdirected ambition, and deeply guarded family secrets.

Marcia Rock: producer/director/writer Writer, professor and independent producer, Marcia Rock maintains a longstanding and continuing interest in the effect of conflict and violence trapped within the intimacy of the family circle. Her award-winning documentary, Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories, on the changing role of women in Northern Ireland, (1997) won the American Women in Radio and Television Grand Award and Documentary Award and won the first place Chris Award from the Columbus International Film & Video Festival, among others. It aired in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Spain, Canada and on PBS stations in the US. "Back from Beyond: Women Abuse and Drugs," (1998) profiles a new approach to drug treatment, specifically geared to women addicts convicted of non-violent felonies. In 1994, she produced City Originals: Women Making It Work hosted by New York's first lady, Donna Hanover Giuliani, which won a bronze plaque at the 1994 Christopher Awards in the social issues category, and honorable mention from American Women in Radio and Television Commendation Awards in 1995. Her interest in Ireland began in the 1970s with her first documentary, The Bronx Irish at the Ramparts, lamenting the disappearing Irish neighborhoods in New York. Three documentaries on Ireland and Irish Americans followed. Sons of Derry (1992) profiles the Protestant Glen Barr and the Catholic Paddy Doherty and the story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as told through their lives. It received a bronze medal from the New York International Program Festival in 1993. No Irish Need Apply (1993) visits 1860s New York with tour guide Peter Quinn, based on his novel, Banished Children of Eve (Penguin Books 1995). McSorley's New York (1987) chronicles the history of New York's Irish immigrant community and the role McSorley's Ale House has played in the cultural and political life of the city. The film received an Emmy Award in 1988. Rock's interests extend to the arts, literature and international affairs. Her documentary on the literary history of Greenwich Village titled Village Writers: The Bohemian Legacy, (1991) was nominated for a New York Emmy in 1992. Her profile of North Carolina writer Reynolds Price in Reynolds Price: A Writer's Inheritance (1990), explores the powerful relationship between family history and art and won the Red Ribbon Award from the American Film and Video Festival 1992. Rock also produced a documentary on the media coverage of the Intifada in Israel in 1988 and received her first Emmy in 1983 for The Singing Angels in China, a chronicle of a Cleveland youth choir's trip to China. Marcia Rock is the Director of Broadcast Journalism and a professor in the Department of Journalism, New York University. Dr. Rock co-authored Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News (University of Illinois Press 1988) with veteran newscaster Marlene Sanders.