Culture
This Video Brilliantly Captures Our Fear of Walking In Sync With Strangers
A dramatization of an unspoken sidewalk struggle.
It happens often enough: you’re going down a busy street and all of a sudden you find yourself walking at the exact same pace as a stranger and ... uh oh, time to speed up or slow down.
This phenomenon is masterfully captured in Walking Contest, a new short film from artists Daniel Koren and Vania Heymann. In the video, shot entirely on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Koren avoids walking next to strangers by treating it as a race. But he ultimately questions why we react so strongly to this phenomenon in the first place. Is it because it seems rude, unsafe, or just too awkward?