| Philosophie | A UK cinema commercial, made ambitiously on a small budget for an open-minded client, to showcase the low-light capabilities of the Leica SL camera and M lenses in a cinematic way. It's an evocative nocturnal journey, set to Byron’s poem ‘She Walks in Beauty Like the Night’. The story is told through the eyes of seven female photographers in different cities and landscapes as they each move through the night, capturing the unexpected worlds that come alive after dark where they are. The film draws on Leica's long history as a brand associated with street photography. Leica invented the 35mm still format, which allowed for smaller, hand-held cameras that could be used unobtrusively out in the world. The film interprets “She Walks” as applying to the journeying of the female street photographers, and interprets the “beauty” of night-time inclusively – to include the sad, the sinister, the suggestive, the confrontational. Shot around the globe in Berlin, Bucharest, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Paris, Lesotho and Johannesburg, the scenes in the film range from mountain landscapes to city life, from glimpses of crime to moments of romance. The film gathers pace and builds more and more tension, culminating in a Blood Moon and engaging the viewer directly, asking: What will you see in the dark? The spoken words the famous 1814 poem by Lord Byron - "She Walks In Beauty Like The Night', which was written to describe a darkly beautiful woman. This film reverses the direction of the gaze and makes the female photographers it define the visual perspective, while the beauty that they walk in is the mysterious dark beauty of the night. |