SHE DANCES: Director Rick Gomez, center, and lead actor Steve Zahn video the crowd at the premiere of “She Dances” to send to a theater in Chicago to promote an event there. Audrey Zahn, who is the co-lead in the film, looks on with bemusement at their antics. (Photo by Scott White)

A QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSION took place immediately after the premiere screening of “She Dances” at the Kentucky Theater last Friday evening. Audrey and Steve Zahn discussed everything from being a real-life father-daughter duo portraying a father-daughter in the movie to how the idea for the film originated, and how they enjoyed showcasing their hometown of Midway. (Photo by Scott White)

This past Friday night, a good portion of Midway, with more than a few non-Midway Woodford Countians thrown in, was at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington. Why? The newest film made by and starring Steve Zahn, their fellow Midwegian, was having its world-wide premiere.

Even better, Zahn and his production and writing partner, Rick Gomez, who co-wrote the script with Zahn, along with Zahn’s daughter, Audrey, who was a co-lead, were holding a question-and-answer session after the showing.

Shot in Midway, Somerset, Lexington and even Slade, She Dances tells the story of a family coping with a tragedy while a father, played by Zahn, and daughter, played by Audrey in her first film role, find each other again in, of all places, the world of competitive dance . . . not unlike Versailles own Jane’s School of Dance.

Though the film premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival in New York in June 2025, where its distribution rights were sold, its release kicked off with a Kentucky Theater premiere.

And, this is, to quote the great director, a Midway “joint.”

The film was made by Macaroni Art Productions, which was formed, along with two other founders, by close friends Zahn and Gomez. Both are commercially and critically well-established actors, with current roles in Apple TV’s series Silo. They have also opened their own production company to tell stories via films and documentaries.

One of their first efforts was also shot in Kentucky, the docuseries You Belong Here, featuring another beloved Midwegian, the award-winning Chef Ouita Michel, which its website describes as “an exploration of memory, generational legacy and the seasonality of life.”

But, back to She Dances. It really is a family project. Two other Zahns make uncredited appearances – Robyn Peterman, a noted novelist and actor who is Zahn’s wife and Audrey’s mother, and Henry Zahn, Zahn’s son and Audrey’s older brother, who is expected to soon open up a business in Midway. Gomez’s son plays the tech-guy. Most of the dance extras are from Audrey’s school growing up, the Lexington Dance Factory, and Audrey’s good friend, Haley Fish, has a role.

And, Midway itself stands in for their hometown, where Jason (played by Zahn) and Brian (played by Zahn’s old friend Ethan Hawke) own a boutique bourbon distillery called “Two Jacks,” named for each of their characters’ sons. Chef Ouita, appearing as herself, and Holly Hill Inn, appearing as itself, make an early appearance in the film where Jason and Brian are negotiating the sale of their bourbon business to a large corporation.

Gomez and Zahn wrote the script during the pandemic, and it took about five years to go from writing to release. Zahn said the idea of the story started with me taking Audrey to her last dance competition in high school.

“My wife couldn’t go, so I took her and it was great, and it was fun, and I was so proud of her,” Zahn said. “I kept relaying that to my friend (Gomez) and he’d say, ‘Man, there’s a movie here, there’s a story to tell.’ And that’s where it started . . . and Audrey was really the only person we thought of doing (that role).”

“I hoped we could make a movie that families could watch it together. Steve and I very early on said we wanted to make a cinematic independent film for families, and you don’t see that a lot,” Gomez said. “And audiences are so smart, and so attuned to emotion . . . we hoped we could talk about stuff that is hard to talk about, and during COVID we experienced some of those tough things and it made its way into the movie.”

Zahn added, “Yeah, we wanted to do something without gimmicks and a total lack of cynicism because there’s plenty of that in the world right now. We just wanted a simple story about people.”

Deploying an ingenious split-screen technique several times, Director Gomez first used it to show Jason and Claire (played by Audrey) each driving home through the downtown streets of Midway – Jason to an apartment and Claire to the family home where she lives with her mother.

It is from this point that the narrative proceeds when, over the protests of Claire, her mother kind of guilt-trips Jason to be the adult chaperone for Claire and her best friend to compete at their final dance competition before graduating from high school. This entails a road trip down what we know is the Mountain Parkway with an overnight stop in a roadside hotel in what we know is Slade, and then arriving in a large city for the event. (Marriott Griffin Gate is the location used for staging the competition.)

And these are just some of the Woodford County/Central Kentucky triggers – we see a dirty Ale 8 One hat hanging from the office door in the distillery and the distillery itself appears to be the Bluegrass Distillers at Elkwood Farm in Midway. There are also lots of other Midway and Woodford County Easter eggs.

Beautifully shot by cinematographer David Morrison, the film understands the world of competitive dance while avoiding mawkish stereotypes as well as capturing the beauty of Kentucky. The Holly Hill Inn scene will confirm all the stories you’ve told to your friends about what an amazing experience Chef Ouita and General Manager Jackie Anthony provide to their guests.

The film has received strong reviews, including from the New York Times and RogerEbert.com, with an 88 percent positive score on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate review site.

Though this is not a review, this is a film that deals maturely and honestly in telling its story of a father and daughter who have found themselves, perhaps surprisingly to themselves, estranged from each other by the gravity of grief. The story is told with the careful hands of filmmakers experienced in their craft and art, in which comic moments are natural and difficult experiences for the characters, told with care and compassion.

It is also right to say that the entire Zahn crew, with a little help from their friends and colleagues, has done Midway and Woodford County proud. And, don’t wait for it to stream. Go see it in the theater. You’ll love seeing our home county on the big screen.