Farrell tells her own story, from her childhood passion for dance (her partner was an armchair she named Jacques d'Amboise, who became her first important partner at New York City Ballet) to the ferment of her ecstatic youthful partnership with George Balanchine and their profound almost-love affair. For her, at 17, the passion was in the dancing; for the great choreographer, 42 years her senior and in the habit of marrying his greatest ballerinas, the passion existed on more levels. Her emotional turmoil led to her marriage to the gifted young dancer Paul Mejia and their tangled departure from the company. We glimpse her bittersweet years with Maurice Béjart's company in Brussels, her triumphant return to Balanchine, and the deepening of her art. The narrative is skillfully interwoven with images of her recent post-retirement work staging "her" ballets for other dancers.

The camera sticks close to Farrell's beautiful, expressive face, as mobile now as it was reticent and private in her dancing. She takes out the letter with the love poem Balanchine wrote to her at the time he staged his first ballet for her, Meditation. She fights tears when she talks about the night she left the company. There are poignant interviews with Mejia, d'Amboise, Béjart (with some compelling footage of Farrell in his Romeo and Juliet), and two more of her partners, Arthur Mitchell and Edward Villella, as well as with her mother (who admits to encouraging Suzanne's intimacy with Balanchine). There's no word from Peter Martins, who was for years her perfect partner but who recently fired her from the NYCB staff. Or from any other ballerina. Neither is there any mention of her two hip operations, the failure of Martins and the NYCB to take advantage of her teaching qualifications, or her final painful dismissal.

The clips of her teaching or rehearsing with a new generation of dancers in her famous roles show a determined, sympathetic, and supportive mentor. "If I were still dancing, I would steal many things," she says encouragingly to a French ballerina who's having trouble capturing Farrell's fiendish gyrations in Tzigane, the first ballet Balanchine made for her when she returned.

Astonishing excerpts flash by, some familiar from the PBS Dance in America programs and Balanchine's film of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Farrell was Titania), but many never before made public: home movies of a precocious, adorable tomboy in Cincinnati ("Roberta Sue Ficker"); rehearsal films of her first important Balanchine role (when she replaced the pregnant Diana Adams in Stravinsky's Movements for Piano and Orchestra); her youthful, teasing Terpsichore opposite d'Amboise's Apollo; her flamboyant, high-kicking hoofer/stripper in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Balanchine's surprising re-creation for her of the choreography he did for his wife Tamara Geva 30 years before in Rodgers & Hart's On Your Toes).

Most thrilling are four brief sequences from the opening night of Don Quixote, when Balanchine himself played Don Q. Farrell's solo is phenomenal, a blizzard of powerful, expressive movement, off-center, abandoned (the quality d'Amboise encouraged in her), fearless (she's practically flying), yet elegant, pure, and breathtakingly confident. Her affection for Balanchine is palpable, and Balanchine's helplessness, on his knees before her beauty, is so loving, fragile, and achingly real.

Surely there's more footage where this comes from, and it's frustrating we don't get anything more extended than a minute (so we miss her uncanny sense of musical continuity). There's no footage of her sublime backwards fall in the Adagio movement of Symphony in C (a signature role) or the tortured pas de deux from Agon (the last role she danced in Boston). Still, what's here is precious. And one of the most moving moments of all is her final curtain call on the night she retired from City Ballet -- a clip that, like the rest of this film, commemorates one of ballet's greatest artists, and one of its greatest losses.