The Need to Dance is a portrait of the Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, one of the most versatile and successful dance artists of our times. The documentary follows him as he travels all over Europe. As the film observes him creating and performing widely different styles of dance, he talks in an interior monologue about what lies behind his irrepressible urge to dance. As the son of a Moroccan father, a Muslim, and a Roman-Catholic Flemish mother, it was anything but obvious that he would become an artist.