Short film — durational narrative output

Horizons Dorés is a short film created in the summer of 2012 on the rooftop of the apartment building where Seth Dager was living on Central Park North in New York City. Shot during the same period as Les Fausses Coïncidences, the work shifts away from narrative fiction and toward atmospheric documentation.

The film functions loosely as a music video set to “Flutes” by Hot Chip.

Across its duration, the camera alternates between two visual registers: wide establishing shots of the surrounding cityscape and quiet observational footage of Dager and Emmanuel Libet moving across the rooftop space. The two appear separately and together, pacing, sitting, and crossing the open surface as the day gradually moves toward evening.

The environment is central to the work.

On the day the film was shot, the air over Manhattan was unusually humid and hazy. The sky carried a soft, diffused glow that lingered through sunset, flattening the skyline into a warm, atmospheric field. In the final edit, a subtle color grade was used to preserve and extend this tonal quality, emphasizing the muted gold haze that gave the film its title.

Rather than constructing a narrative, Horizons Dorés preserves a shared moment.

The rooftop becomes both stage and vantage point—an elevated threshold between private life and the surrounding city. Movement across the space is casual and unstructured. The figures do not perform actions so much as inhabit the environment while the music carries the temporal rhythm of the piece.

Within the broader Ezra practice, Horizons Dorés can be understood retrospectively as an early cinematic experiment in durational presence. The work documents a lived moment—friendship, atmosphere, and place—through restrained observation rather than story or explanation.

The film does not attempt to dramatize the moment.

It holds it long enough for its tone to remain.

In this way, Horizons Dorés functions as a quiet tribute to a shared summer and to a friendship seen through the authorial lens of the camera.

Credits

Directed by Seth Dager

Edited by Seth Dager

Featuring Seth Dager & Emmanuel Libet

Music:

“Flutes” — Hot Chip