Role: Director ✦ Cinematographer ✦ Editor ✦ Colorist ✦ Sound Designer

The film's structure is inspired by the seventeenth-century Ballet Royal de la Nuit, in which four night watches, or veilles (what we call acts), lead up to Louis XIV's appearance as Apollo, the rising sun at dawn. I adapted that transition from darkness to light into an interpreted story about a young traveler (me) whose initial awe and sense of alienation gradually give way to intimacy, reckoning, stillness, and clarity. The end result is not a historical reenactment or a traditional travel film. It's a personal visual opera with the city as the stage. The film is also motivated by Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, particularly its use of travel imagery and narration.

The film unfolds in four veilles (“night watches”) and a final Grand Ballet:

1. Première Veille: Ce Qui Se Passe: Translating to “First Watch: What Is Happening.” In the original ballet, the first watch showed the ordinary inhabitants of the kingdom (shepherds, beggars, thieves, coquettes, and bandits) passing before the night fully took hold. In parallel, this act in the film centers ordinary modern Parisian life as the protagonist watches from the position of an outsider learning. 

2. Deuxième Veille: Les Divertissements: Translating to “Second Watch: The Pleasures.” In the original ballet, the second watch featured Venus, the Three Graces, and various allegories representing the pleasures of love, gaming, and delight before the darkness of the next watch. In my film’s act, we learn about the traveler’s growing relationship with Paris through food, light, colors, and familiar scenes.

3. Troisième Veille: Le Sabbat, La Lune: Translating to “Third Watch: The Sabbath, The Moon.” In the original ballet, the third watch falls into darkness as the Moon descends and the witches celebrate a black sabbath with werewolves and demons parading. We interrupt the romance in my third act with the historical weight buried alive under Paris’s beauty, like the royal tombs, the Roman foundations, and monuments.

4. Quatrième Veille: Le Sommeil et le Silence: Translating to “Fourth Watch: Sleep and Silence.” In the original ballet, the fourth watch was the shortest and most unusual, being a period of stillness before Aurora arrived to announce the sun. My act kills any narration and theme. In a moment of rest, the traveler stops trying to interpret the city and simply lives in it.

5. Grand Ballet: Le Soleil: Translating to “The Sun.” In the Grand Ballet, Aurora announces a light so brilliant it blinds her and then says, “Le soleil qui me suit, c'est le jeune Louis" (The Sun that follows me is young Louis). The fifteen-year-old king rises in gold surrounded by princes, and the night is over. The film concludes with a final movement through Versailles and the Louvre, ending on the sun itself. The Sun King metaphor is that the protagonist does not rise into power but into a more attentive way of seeing.

Sound is treated as a secondary form of cinematography.  Musically, the film uses an experimental soundscape using public-domain French Baroque recordings by musicians such as Lully, Charpentier, and Handel obtained via Musopen and the Internet Archive. I wrote the third-person poetic narration using fragments from my observation notes during the trip. Its language mixes repetition and recurring mantras to transform the film's journey into one that is felt as well as heard.