In 1983, Chantal Akerman followed Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal's tour from La Scala in Milan to Venice, and to the Festival d’Avignon for five weeks, and captured their performances and rehearsals. Akerman confesses that she had an impulse even to close her eyes when she encountered their performance for the first time, and she reconstructs the sudden feelings that occurred in her film by using performance scenes and behind-the-scenes as her materials.

Pina Bausch talked with dancers from all over the world about their private experiences and translated it into a performance to theatrically personalize the dancers, demolishing the traditional dance trait that washes the personality of the body for "physical anonymity." For instance, Lutz Förster (who worked as a Tanztheater Wuppertal's art director from 2013 to 2016 after Bausch died in 2009) recalls— "one day, Pina asked," so he sang “The Man I Love,” composed by Gershwin, with the sign language he just learned—and Bausch engraved it into her monumental piece, Carnations. The audience will never forget Förster's gestures that represent and simultaneously suppress the “idea of love,” or the “event” which Akerman makes it seen twice in the movie. [SHIN Eun-shil]​