How radical tenderness became a dance of protest

Can you talk us through the concept for the film and the James Baldwin quote it opens with?

Ternura was born in an in-between space. I'd flown to Mexico City to direct a commercial, carrying real frustration and grief about a world that felt increasingly violent and fractured. The day I landed, the US had just moved on Venezuela. A few days later, ICE killed Renée Good in Minnesota. On set I was working with an extraordinary choreographer, Paulina Pulido (Pau), and we connected instantly. 

At night I'd come back to my hotel room and watch the news feeling helpless. I pitched Pau the idea of a side project. She was onboard immediately. The piece became a small gesture of love through movement, a film that could express vulnerability, fear and hope.

That idea struck a deep chord: tenderness itself could be radical.

James Baldwin has always been a writer who inspires me, and his line: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” felt right for what we're living through, in America and across the world. There's also a moment in the film where we de-mask one of the dancers, which is its own act of ‘facing’. 

Can you explain what the word Ternura means?

'Ternura' is the Spanish word for tenderness, used often in Mexico to describe a particular kind of softness and care. Pau introduced me to it when we started shaping the piece and our producer Helena Medina then put me onto Manifiesto de la Ternura Radical — a transfeminist manifesto written in 2015 by Dani D'Emilia and Daniel B. Coleman. It frames tenderness, vulnerability and intimacy as forms of resistance against violence and colonial legacies.

That idea struck a deep chord: tenderness itself could be radical. In a moment when so much of the world's vocabulary is aggression and dominance, choosing softness is a political act. Pau's working line says it best: “la revolución será la ternura radical.” The revolution will be radical tenderness.

Above: Rachel McDonald (centre) on set with choreographer Paulina Pulido and DP Christopher Blauvelt.

Tell me about how you pulled the film together at speed with no budget.

It happened fast. Pulido and I started shaping the piece in the after hours of the commercial shoot. With almost no time, she began building the original choreography with her dancers, and what emerged spoke volumes without a word of dialogue. They're extraordinary at telling story through movement.

We had one hour to shoot the dance but that intensity forced us to make decisions instantly and trust each other.

What carried us through was that everyone was feeling some version of the same heaviness and wanted to channel it into a piece of art. When I asked my friend and longtime collaborator Chris Blauvelt if he'd shoot it, he just said, “Let's make something from our hearts, Rach.” We shot the entire dance in one hour.

What were the high and low points during production?

The high was the feeling that everyone was in this for the art. That the dancers, Pulido, Blauvelt, and the whole crew were using that hour to express something we were collectively carrying. There was no client to please, no deck to pitch, just a shared instinct to make something beautiful and meaningful.

I'm not sure I'd call anything a low. The biggest pressure was the time. We had one hour to shoot the dance but that intensity forced us to make decisions instantly and trust each other. We dropped into a flow together that was instinctual. Pulido, the dancers, and our generous crew made that possible. The whole production ended up moving like a dance itself, and I loved that. 

Above: On the set of Ternura, which was shot in an empty sound stage in Mexico City.

Was your new home RSA involved in the production?

Not on the production side — I was wrapping my last commercial with Biscuit when Ternura came together, and Biscuit and The Lift in CDMX were the ones who helped me produce it. RSA has been wonderful in post, though, and incredibly supportive of the film since I joined. It already feels like a real creative home, and I'm grateful that one of my early projects under that roof gets to be a piece this personal.

Movement can hold a complexity that words sometimes flatten.

Following Bryan Buckley's ResistDance, do you think that dance as a medium is going to become an increasingly popular form of political expression?

I think dance has always been a form of political expression — the body is where so much of this gets carried, especially for communities who've had words taken from them or used against them. So I'm not sure it's becoming popular so much as becoming visible again to a wider audience.

If more filmmakers are turning to dance to speak to this moment, I'd say we're catching up to the practitioners who've been doing it all along.

What I love about Bryan's piece, and what I was reaching for here, is that movement can hold a complexity that words sometimes flatten. You can grieve and hope and resist inside a single gesture.

Pulido's network in Mexico – artivists, community dancers, collectives – has been practicing this for years, and the Radical Tenderness manifesto has circulated through performance, pedagogy and activism for over a decade. So if more filmmakers are turning to dance to speak to this moment, I'd say we're catching up to the practitioners who've been doing it all along.