Kissing Strangers: Filmmaker Tatia Pilieva Captures the Elusive ‘First Kiss’
A screenshot from filmmaker Tatia Pilieva’s short film “First Kiss.” Photo Credit: Tatia Pilieva / WREN.
They say a photo is worth a thousand words, but so is a kiss as it envelops you in its enigmatic passion, painting images of what’s yet to come in the canvas of your mind and leaving you utterly breathless and speechless as you break away to gaze deep into the windows of the owner’s soul — a tempestuous sea of hidden truths and fantasies. Filmmaker Tatia Pilieva, in collaboration with clothing company Wren, has managed to capture this fleeting moment of desire and radiance in her short black-and-white video First Kiss, which in less than a day had gone viral online — with, as of writing this, currently 53,779,211 million views on YouTube — and even led to a parody titled First Lick by Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night, the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, showcasing cats and dogs instead of humans partaking in the impassioned act.
Starring various models, actors and musicians, among them Damian Kulash of OK Go, Ingrid Schram, Soko, and Jill Larson, the strikingly artistic video showcases 20 strangers sharing an intimate moment, albeit with a bit of giggling and awkwardness shown behind the scenes, much like you’d expect when meeting a blind date. While it might not be as spontaneous and empowering as kissing someone you just exchanged a series of looks with at the bar or even bumped into in a club, it certainly has a romantic flair to it, despite the connotation that the video could be seen as more so a performance than that of sudden infatuation due to the inclusion of hired talent and its advertising purpose. Regardless of this fact, the video still manages to capture something that few of us have experienced, especially whilst not intoxicated: kissing someone who we barely had time to converse with, not knowing whether the kiss is the start of something indescribable or merely the beginning of the end — something that is over as soon as it was set in motion, nothing more than a pleasant memory etched into a sentence of a chapter of one’s life.
Video Courtesy of Tatia Pilieva.
