“Water Flowing Together,” screening this week at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival, moves gracefully between Jock Soto’s roots on a Navajo reservation and his 25-year reign as one of New York City Ballet’s principal dancers. Mr. Soto approached photographer Gwendolen Cates with the idea for this film, which closely chronicles the last months of his ballet career prior to his retirement in June 2005. Ms. Cates’s direction celebrates Mr. Soto’s balletic achievements, as well as his transition into post-retirement life. Mr. Soto seems to have used the film as a stimulus to investigate and reconcile with his rich and varied heritage.

Mr. Soto is not the first American Indian dancer to succeed in ballet. Maria Tallchief was one of NYCB’s earliest and greatest stars, and there were several other Native American dancers prominent in other ballet companies during the 1940s and ’50s. Nevertheless, Mr. Soto’s trajectory is rare and remarkable. His mother is Navajo; his father Puerto Rican. “We had no money,” he recalls of his upbringing on a hardscrabble reservation in Arizona. “We lived in a trailer.” His parents made handcrafts and sold them itinerantly at tribal pow-wows. Mr. Soto began performing the traditional Navajo hoop dance when he was three years old. He was accepted at Manhattan’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan at age 11, and at 16 joined NYCB, where he was immediately promoted and showcased.

Between Mr. Soto and his family there is distance but not estrangement. “For a long time we weren’t close with Jock,” his mother says. For the three decades after moving to New York, he never spent more than three days with them at a time, although they were supportive of his ambitions from the very beginning. In recent years, his mother says, she and his father began to feel guilty that they had not taken a more active role in parenting. His mother’s sister says that Mr. Soto “forgot that he is an Indian.” Mr. Soto doesn’t come across as quite as regretful. “It seemed to me like it was just poverty,” Mr. Soto says of his native community. “I always wanted to be far away … do something other than remaining.” He says that he was afraid his success would provoke retributory witchcraft from reservation neighbors. When he returned to the reservation during the making of this film, he says, it was the “first time I think I ever felt really comfortable about being there. . . I discovered how beautiful it really is.” The film also accompanies him back to Puerto Rico for a warm reunion with his father’s relatives.

As for his ballet career, Mr. Soto was more than in demand; he was a retaining wall of NYCB, and he discusses the grueling schedule he maintained throughout most of his career. There is the sense throughout the film that Mr. Soto’s prowess as a balletic partner both engendered and inhibited his full development. In all likelihood, it took a premature toll on his body. There is footage of Mr. Soto dancing at many stages of his career, expertly supporting many different ballerinas. We see Mr. Soto become stockier, his torso less responsive in the footage, although at the same time his movement expression become deeper. Mr. Soto talks about wanting to retire before he was forced to but, in truth, his strength as a solo technician had declined well before he retired in 2005, although he remained a great performer and a great partner.

The film is entirely laudatory: If Mr. Soto ever had an unkind thought, it is not acknowledged. He is up-front about family and personal issues, and concerns of heritage and racial and sexual identity, but the film pointedly steers clear of controversial issues in ballet-world politics. Indeed, the film was made with the apparent complete cooperation of NYCB, and it is a celebration of the company as much as of Mr. Soto. Although he was one of the last dancers selected by Balanchine before his death in 1983, Mr. Soto’s career blossomed under the guidance and tutelage of Peter Martins, who was choreographing for Mr. Soto even before Balanchine died and Mr. Martins became the company’s artistic director. Mr. Soto was not only the constant onstage partner of NYCB’s Heather Watts, but also a close friend of the ballerina. She was at that time the companion of Mr. Martins, and was without question a person of great influence in the company. Mr. Soto eventually shared a country house with Ms. Watts, with whom he also wrote a cookbook published by Riverhead Books in 1997. In “Water Flowing Together,” there’s a clip from Ms. Watts’s and Mr. Soto’s appearance together on Robin Leach’s television show to plug the book, and included in the film are glowing tributes to his talent from Ms. Watts and Mr. Martins. But there is no mention of the privileged, cliquish, and mightily resented enclave in which they were cocooned within NYCB for more than a decade. Perhaps this is insider baseball stuff as far as the general viewer is concerned, but it would have contextualized and fleshed out the story of Mr. Soto’s rise in the company. Talent, no matter how sizeable, is rarely the entire story.

The occupational hazards of dance are never far from any dancer’s biography, and here they are driven home uncompromisingly, as are the rewards and satisfaction experienced by Mr. Soto and his ballerinas. There’s no such thing as retirement security for an American ballet dancer; Mr. Soto is fortunate in that he has taught at SAB for the last decade, as well as pursuing since his retirement a professional culinary career. In addition, Mr. Soto is also currently performing the role of Lord Capulet in Mr. Martins’s “Romeo + Juliet” at NYCB.

His formidable talent, charm, and drive are apparent throughout the film, and there is no doubt that he will remain a vital presence in the arts world. “Water Flowing Together” addresses ballet more seriously and more insightfully than most comparable documentaries; it’s engrossing as an encapsulation of Mr. Soto’s artistry and as an exploration of cultural interface and cultural commonality.