Ballerina is a 1937 French ballet film directed by Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, starring Yvette Chauviré, Mia Slavenska and Janine Charrat.
It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl who fears that her favourite performer at the Paris Opera Ballet will be replaced by a Russian ballerina, and sets out to engineer an accident for the rival.
[1] Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times wrote in 1998: "The hard-nosed American critics raving about the film recognized its special and exquisite quality from the start.
Rightly ignoring its surface sentimentality, they were clearly unnerved and impressed by Benoit-Levy's psychological insight into childhood innocence gone awry.
Kisselgoff continued: "The title ballet, not to be confused with Fokine's famous solo The Dying Swan, looks downright silly, but elsewhere Lifar's choreography is firmly grounded in the classical idiom.