Enterprising choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s recent move back to his native France to take up the coveted directorship of the Paris Ballet Opera hasn’t meant he has severed ties with his great muse: Los Angeles. Three years after setting up the LA Dance Project, Millepied is hard at work on the artist collective’s ongoing trilogy, Gems. A Van Cleef & Arpels-commissioned project, the ballet is a retelling of George Balanchine’s 1967 Jewels, often cited as the seminal choreographer’s most defining work that was inspired by his regular walks past the store windows on New York’s Fifth Avenue. 

Millepied’s filmic response to the first in the trilogy, Reflections, which was performed earlier this year during L.A. Dance Project's residency at the Ace Hotel, riffs on the five personalities he grew close to during the company’s fledgling years. “It’s so much about interaction, affection, love and the dynamic of a group that works together all the time,” he says. True to the interdisciplinary style that has earned him comparisons to a modern-day Mikhail Baryshnikov, the choreographer enlisted Barbara Kruger for the visual concept and David Lang for the original score. 

“When I moved to LA, I loved the city so much the film is very much a love letter to it,” he notes. "You see all of these places in one film that are so strongly identified with the city: that bridge and highway, and Santa Monica, the beach… There’s a reference to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by Cassavetes. That club that has very strong visuals and it’s one of my favorite movies.”