Raphael Stora
Body, Camera, Lineage
Between cinema and hip hop, and between personal and family histories, Raphaël Stora returns to the body as a language.
Raphaël Stora is a filmmaker and dancer. He learned to dance within the world of hip hop battles, alongside his film studies at Université Paris 8. This dual training—between the street and the film school—has profoundly shaped his gaze.
In 2017, he directed Les Promesses du sol, a documentary series broadcast on Arte, paying tribute to the Parisian hip hop scene through ten years of previously unseen archival footage. The film captures a generation of dancers still working on the margins, with a rare attention to their singularity and creative urgency.
After the series, he stepped away from dance to pursue a career in directing, collaborating with artists such as Saïdo Lehlouh, Bonnie Banane, and Ndoho Ange, among others. Yet something resisted that departure. At 40, he chose to return to the stage. The return was not without difficulty: his body had changed, the scene had evolved, and the demands of virtuosity felt more pressing than ever.
From this return emerged Les Corps électriques, a first-person documentary broadcast on Arte in 2025. The film follows this pivotal moment, shaped by doubt, trial, and encounter, alongside figures such as Saïdo Lehlouh and Suzanne Degennaro. It is also a story of lineage: the son of historian Benjamin Stora, he dances with a canvas cap on his head while his father works to make France acknowledge its colonial past. A family history marked by the death of his sister at age 12, exile in Vietnam, and the threats his father received after taking a public stance on the Algerian War.
Les Corps électriques tells of what the body repairs when words fall short, and how dance becomes, at 40, a recovered language.
