The flower power in Brasília - a film campaign

Patrick Guedji, creative director of Kenzo Parfums, chose to shoot the Kenzo campaign (September 2015) around the Brazilian National Congress in Brasilia. 

"The two previous Flower campaigns were shot in Paris. And the idea of this new campaign was to radically change setting and find a city, and to look for a new city. It couldn't be La Defénse in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai... It was necessary to find a city with a poetic and feminine dimension. A sensual dimension. There is a city in the world which meets this criterion to perfection, and that's Brasília. It seemed to be the ideal setting to tell this new story", Guedji said.

Jan Houllevigue, the artistic director, says that 'in the architecture of Niemeyer, there's something extremely human and alive. There is poetry, a visual kind of poetry.' 

In line with the campaign's code name ["urban flower"/"crimson"], the film shoot shows red poppies coming out of the ground. 

According to Fred Brandon, SFX supervisor, '[it's the magic of that flower which grows out of enormous, majestic buildings, with all these flowers scattered across the city.' 

Although they do not really show the principle of a shower that faces out this wall of soldiers, the campaign was inspired by Marc Riboud's iconic anti-war photograph of "a young girl, Jan Rose Kasmir, with a flower in her hands and a kindly gaze in her eyes, standing in front of several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed to block the protesters" (Wikipedia). 

To Guedji, 'Marc Riboud's photo is very inspiring because it is a very strong expression of the power of fragility versus force, of the power of a flower, the power of poetry in the face of extremely brutal events.'