Experience a Lifetime Through One Women's Eye's in Powerful Film 'Mona'

Miles Jay captures an entire lifetime through one woman’s eyes, masterfully weaving raw emotions with delicately observed human truths in 'Mona' for Zeiss.

To achieve an extraordinary level of detail, Jay employed a hand-crank camera, crafting images that are both visually stunning and emotionally resonant. His hands-on approach adds a tactile, intimate layer to the storytelling, enhancing the film’s exploration of the sublime beauty of time passing.

Director Miles Jay said, "The script came in as a life flashes before your eyes in POV. I’ve always loved this structure when done well, but I was also very concerned how many times it has been done. The agency and Zeiss wanted to focus on how we each see the world individually, so I used that as a jumping off point to create a story that shows the subjectivity of our life, intercut with an objective observed reality. To tell the story, you need to hit some major beats of a life, which can often feel cliché, so it was a challenge to show these key beats in a way that felt fresh and would still connect with the audience. The difference between relatable and cliché is found in the details so I tried to focus the story in the specific. Then amongst the major story beats, I wanted to highlight images, that felt from my own memory, to not think too much. Just shoot what I felt. Let the unconscious have some space in the film. Throughout scouting, I’d discover images that felt akin to the sublime beauty of time passing. I hope the combination helps make it feel like we aren’t throwing plot down the throat of the audience while not veering too far off into the ethereal that we can’t track the story. To contrast the subjectivity POV scenes which I shot mostly hand-cranked on film, so I could control the speed of the film myself, I shot the observed scenes on digital so I could shoot 30 minute takes and truly observe behaviour. I feel these scenes ground us and help us connect with the character in a different way. We see ourselves as heroes in the film of our lives, we all live in our own dream."