“You never forget your first love; it’s an emotional rollercoaster that stays with you for the rest of your life,” says director Mees Peijnenburg of his latest visual imagining. “It’s a crucial event that sets a mark for future relationships.”

First Love is an experimental invocation of the director’s most emblematic motifs—heartbreak and human connection. Peijnenburg evocatively summons the disorientating joy and debilitating euphoria of love in a film that is part poetry, part aphrodisiac. 

“Falling in love feels like a bubble in which the world disappears. Daily life is temporarily suspended, the world freezes and time is eclipsed,” says the director, who cast leading fashion model Jordan K. Barrett and rising actor Olivia Lonsdale as his seductive on-screen couple. “Your senses are on fire and everyone is getting burned. It’s overwhelming, frightening and scary, but above all it’s magical.”

These vignettes of an unfurling romance forged by the exuberance of youth do not follow a traditional narrative structure but is a visual approximation of the all-consuming power of romantic passion. “The shots are long, interrupted by flashing moments, and the camera is always moving at a slow tempo,” says Peijnenburg. “I wanted to capture an electric energy in the film; make the screen vibrate with pace and rhythm.”