A good documentarian has a few tricks up their sleeve. Old-fashioned interviewer-interviewee dialogue coupled with archive footage rarely holds a modern viewer’s attention, and isn’t all that clever. What makes a documentary come to life is its director’s filmmaking prowess, and German Kral’s Our Last Tango (2015) has a unique cinematic edge.

The story of the artistically successful but emotionally tumultuous five-decade relationship between Argentine tango legends Maria Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes is presented in a fashion unlike any other documentary. Traditional interview methods and archive footage exist, but they’re punctuated with beautifully-shot dance recreations of important moments in the couple’s history. The filmmaker himself is never present on camera, instead letting the dancers who recreate these moments interview the film’s subjects, and occasionally engage in community discussions with each other about the fascinating people they’re representing. They analyze their characters with each other and even get cues from Nieves, who helps them perfect their interpretations of her life.

The exquisite choreography behind these tango dances is coupled with beautiful period-appropriate cinematography, lighting, and costuming. The film would be worth watching if it were merely a montage of these numbers, performed with incredible eloquence by gorgeous young tango dancers. As the film hovers over the passionate love-turned-hate that Nieves and Copes had for each other, the dances help the viewer understand and feel the complexity of those emotions.

As the Toronto International Film Festival’s website describes it, “Kral takes an inventive approach to evoking the early days of Juan and Maria by casting young dancers to portray them in recreations. But the lines between dramatization and reality are fluid as we watch the real Maria, at age eighty, interact with and offer guidance to the younger performers.”

Nieves and Copes ended up being tango’s Lockwood and Lamont - beacons of perfect chemistry on-stage, and rivals in the real world.

German Kral’s stylistic choice of representing the subjects through their art form, while allowing those subjects to influence the result, is a refreshing take on the documentary dynamic. And having the dancers interview Nieves instead of an outside party boosts the intelligence of the conversation - dancers know what to ask other dancers, and what to talk about. There’s a shared knowledge and passion that elevates the interview segments and Nieves’ and Copes’ responses, which in turn fuels the beauty of the coupled choreography.