Check It. Paper Birds [Guest Post].

We here at the BEAT realize that great writers must always appreciate other great writers. Today we feature a guest post by our talented colleague, Nairi Najarian.
Time. The chase for more hours, minutes, seconds in a day never ends. Never allows for satisfaction with what we've accomplished, always leaves us pining for just another moment. We are the White Rabbits, and Time, well, still the Crocodile. In this Wonderland, the caterpillar no longer asks of us "Who are you?", it is the Facebook who now beckons, "What's on your mind?" No more the mirror-images of Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, than our Twitter twins calling for a re-tweet 140 characters long.

Nikon Festival's "A Day through your Lens" also wants a 140 out of you. A 140 second status update of your day. A live-action tweet. A minute and twenty to tell the world "What's happening." And the top prize for the winning lenscrafter? A cool $100,000. The Office's Rainn Wilson is a judge.

With the stunning "Paper Birds," finalists Shoushan Tavlian and David Falossi accomplish something the other films do not. Something even we, in our everyday, desperately wish to do.

Slow time down.

The daunting prospect of an assigned limit to the film is instantly forgotten upon hearing the first gorgeous aches of the piano. The world created is poignant with colors, music, places and a lovely girl existing in it all. Even when the viewer is transported into the cacophony of nameless streets, cars and pavement, the elegant thread with which our lovely girl bids us to follow is still trailing ever so delicately through the lens. The film auteurs weave us a patchwork of moments leading into moments. A fabric innocent of schedules, appointments and deadlines. A fabric of...time... equal to what we most revere in art, and that's timelessness.

Watch "Paper Birds" and other 140 intervals of time here, and don't forget to vote for your favorite.

-- Nairi Najarian
Nairi is writing amok over at Fête Cheese.