Long before it reaches the pole, this documentary is about bodies that have been through something — shame, violence, self-doubt — and about a room where that history gets set down.
What is Strip Down, Rise Up about?
Strip Down, Rise Up follows a group of women, different in age, background and life story, who come to pole dancing not as spectacle but as a way through trauma and body-image struggles they have carried for years. Director Michèle Ohayon stays close to the process rather than the performance, watching what happens as these women learn to move in ways that ask them to trust their own bodies again. The film treats the studio as a kind of proving ground: part physical practice, part group therapy, part reclamation of something many of the women describe having lost. It also opens a door onto pole artistry itself, taking the form seriously as athletic and expressive work rather than treating it as a punchline.
About the cast
Sheila Kelley, whose own studio and teaching practice sit behind much of the film, anchors the documentary alongside pole artist Jenyne Butterfly. Elizabeth Mihelich and Amy Bond appear among the women whose individual histories give the film its emotional range, each bringing a different reason for walking into that room and a different sense of what she is working to leave behind.
Context & significance
Released in 2021 and directed by Michèle Ohayon, Strip Down, Rise Up runs 112 minutes and sits at the intersection of personal documentary and a wider conversation about how women are allowed to inhabit their own bodies in public. Rather than building toward a single dramatic arc, it moves between several women's stories, letting the studio setting hold the film together. Its subject — pole dancing reframed as discipline and self-expression rather than novelty — gives it a distinct angle within the broader documentary landscape of the same year.
Watching Strip Down, Rise Up on Ktime
Strip Down, Rise Up is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login — the page itself is free to read, and the film starts once you're signed in. K-Time's catalogue and interface are designed with Farsi-speaking audiences in mind, so search and recommendations sit alongside a wide range of international documentaries and features like this one.