We had been riding for two hours under a sky so intensely blue it looked Photoshopped. The landscape had shifted from dense pine forests to rolling, golden hills. Then we saw the first one. A rogue sunflower, standing alone by a barbed-wire fence, its head tilted toward the sun like a radar dish. Then two. Then a dozen. Finally, as we crested a gentle rise, we killed our engines and just stared.
He handed me a beer. “Tell them it’s not a metaphor. It’s just Tuesday.” -Candid-HD- Scooters- Sunflowers and Nudists HD
We spent the afternoon filming. Lena moved through the crowd with her camera, capturing footage that would later win awards at a documentary festival in Berlin. She filmed the way the setting sun turned the sunflowers into a wall of molten gold. She filmed the scooters from a low angle, their shadows stretching long across the grass like recumbent giants. And she filmed the nudists. We had been riding for two hours under
“Beautiful lines,” he said. “Like a naked woman.” A rogue sunflower, standing alone by a barbed-wire
But the magic of the format is that it captures the peripheral. In the background of one shot, a man tried to light a camp stove with a flint, his concentration absolute. In another, two women played chess, their fingers hovering over carved wooden pieces. A child—a toddler who had not yet learned that clothes were a thing—chased a grasshopper with a shriek of joy. The footage was crisp. The colors were surreal: the violent yellow of the sunflowers, the pastel blue of the sky, the warm earth tones of human skin.
We parked the scooters in a neat row. The red Vespa, the turquoise Lambretta, the silent electric—they looked like sculptures of a forgotten civilization next to the towering stalks of sunflowers. A young man, who had been fixing a bicycle chain while naked (a feat of mechanical concentration I would not wish on anyone), wandered over to admire the scooters. He ran a hand over the Vespa’s chrome mudguard.