For many dancers and film lovers, “The Red Shoes” is the only ballet movie that matters.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ravishing 1948 film is a fantastical masterpiece in which everything is heightened: color, emotions and, above all, the urgency of artistic expression. Here, ballet is religion.

The movie’s secret, sacred ingredient? It is anchored by a real — and astonishingly good — ballerina, Moira Shearer, who danced with Sadler Wells Ballet and originated roles in dances by Frederick Ashton and Léonide Massine (he’s in the film, too). In other words, as the rising star Victoria Page, Shearer didn’t need a dance double. (This is not a “Black Swan” situation, in which an actress tries to convince us she is capable of balletic perfection.)

Vicky, though, has problems. She is torn between the total devotion to dance that her impresario, Boris Lermontov, insists upon and the love that she finds with the young composer Julian Craster. And those red slippers, drawn from the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale that the movie is based on, mean a dance to the death.

[Matthew Bourne brings the movie classic to the dance stage]

With Matthew Bourne presenting his own version of “The Red Shoes” at New York City Center through Nov. 5, it seemed like a good time to ask dancers how the movie affected them and their ideas about ballet. It turns out it wasn’t easy to find dancers in their 20s (or even a decade older) who were moved by it or who had even seen it: They came of age with “Center Stage” and “Black Swan.” Connor Holloway, a 23-year-old member of American Ballet Theater, sat down with “The Red Shoes” just for us.