Spotlight: Sara Nesson and Unbound

Spotlight: Sara Nesson and Unbound

Sara Nesson is an artist and storyteller, whose works Body of Water and The Broken Mishkan beautifully portray what it means to come to terms with chronic illness. Once an active kayaker, long distance swimmer, and dancer, Nesson brings her background as a dramatist to her monologues exploring the loss, limitations, and reconciliation of a life with ME/CFS.

Now in a new project, Nesson not only returns to dance but to deeply collaborative work. Her new short film, Unbound, follows a thread of movement from one individual to another. Each of the people in the film live with ME/CFS and/or Long COVID; some are trained dancers while others are not. The participants’ contributions are uniquely their own, but all wordlessly express both constraint and vitality.

In a conversation with us about this extraordinary film, Nesson said that she had long been yearning to tell a story about chronic illness without words, simply through bodies. The genesis came from her own background in theater, movement, and narrative, and direct inspiration came in the film Exquisite Corps by Mitchell Rose. But it wasn’t until Nesson met filmmaker Kimberly Warner, of Unfixed Media, who shares an interest in telling stories about people with chronic illness, that she found the way forward.

Together, Nesson and Warner reached out to people in their networks, and those people also reached out, creating a community around the project. As Nesson says, it wasn’t about finding dancers, it was about finding people with stories to tell.

Warner had been working on projects where people filmed themselves at home with just their phone cameras and a tripod. For Unbound, all instruction and direction were provided remotely, and each participant chose their own location and movements. Because each new participant picks up from the ending gesture of the previous ‘dance’, filming had to be done sequentially, working around the capacities of the severely ill and the schedules and crashes of all participants. The finished film is 6.5 minutes long. Filming took nine months.

With a tight focus on a single person at a time, the film has a stark intimacy. It evokes the isolation that is often a result of complex chronic illness, but also the tenuous but strong connections that we can intentionally build. These diseases can take so much from our lives. Sara Nesson demonstrates how to hold that loss while retaining our capacity for agency, creativity, and beauty.

Unbound will premiere on July 29, 2026