Photographers
Director/Producer
Helga Landauer
Editor
Melody London
Supporting Actor
John Halpern
Production Partner
Project Status
Pre-Production
The story takes place on the last day of the USSR in a coastal Soviet city. The visual references from multiple archival sources in Ukraine and Georgia will evoke a generalized image of a port by the Black Sea at the peak of political turmoil.
The film will open with a TV broadcast from the Communist coup press conference in Moscow that marked the dissolution of the USSR, interlaced with the “Swan Lake” ballet. As the rumors, helicopters, and occasional police patrols circle the coastal city, the fictional characters at first seem to pay no attention to the political events, preoccupied with their individual pursuits.
Three photographers, each with different approaches to their art, set on their separate paths in search of a perfect shot. While they move through the city, each of them at one point or another becomes a participant or an accidental witness in the misfortunes of the young woman Lera.
In the course of the day, Lera, an English translator, suffers successive losses: her apartment, her job, her personal and social status, her relationships with her mother and lover. On the road to the city, she encounters a group of Americans traveling with a famous landscape photographer. Lera’s fate takes a new turn when a stranger from the group proposes to her.
The script is structured in four novellas, each introducing the photographer and resolving with the still image he ends up taking. It is based on real stories, archival images and video narratives as well as manuscripts on the history of optics, interviews and diaries of Henry Carrier Bresson, Ansel Adams and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Helga Landauer is a writer and filmmaker living in the United States since 1996. The films she has written and directed have been screened at major international festivals and venues, including the Louvre, Carnegie Hall, Mar del Plata, Full Frame, Hot Docs Market, Punta de Vista, Documenta Madrid, IDFA, and Cinéma du Réel, among others.
Melody London is a renowned Film Editor of internationally awarded fiction and non-fiction feature films. She began her editing career in 1984 with Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, which won festival awards at both Cannes and Sundance. She continued collaborating with Jarmusch on his next two features (Down by Law, Mystery Train) as well as two segments of Coffee and Cigarettes. In these works, London employed a minimalist editing style that emphasized long cuts in order to emphasize the films’ visuals. In addition to editing many award-winning feature films, she has edited several documentary films connected to her New York underground roots, like Mandy Stein’s Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB and on Heart of a Dog by Laurie Anderson, with whom she has collaborated since 1992. London has also edited documentaries for Sande Zeig (Apache 8, Sister Jaguar’s Journey), was the co-producer and editor on Laura Poitras’ film Risk.
John Halpern a.k.a. John DiLeva Halpern is a filmmaker, conceptual artist, and performance artist based in New York City. He is known for cultural activism and documentaries about art, artists, and Tibetan Buddhism.