A Good Man

The controversial American choreographer Bill T. Jones was invited by the Ravinia Festival near Chicago to put together a piece to mark the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Lincoln, who was the 16th president of the United States and the first to be assassinated, means a lot to Jones. He was a young black boy in the 1950s who grew up in rural Florida before moving to upstate New York, and he describes Lincoln as "the only white man I was allowed to love unconditionally." This was largely due to to the role Lincoln played in the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, Jones is struggling with this historical figure's significance in the Obama era and is uncertain of what form this production about Lincoln's life story should take. At rehearsals for the piece, in which music and theater will play an important role together with dance, he struggles to communicate his vision to his dancers and collaborators. The film follows Jones and his company as they go through the intensely creative process, interweaving these scenes with archive material and interviews with Jones, dancers from the company, and other close colleagues. It turns out that Bill T. Jones is a man who demands the utmost from his people - and from himself.