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Content Highlight of the Week: A good Citizen

03/10/14

This week's highlight comes from Citizen Watches and features an intriguing race against the sun. The short documentary follows a photographer and a pilot as they try to 'steal a night against the planet' by following the sunset across timezones.

It's an engaging premise and the film adeptly sets up the jeopardy at the start with both photographer and pilot talking about the risks of danger before you even know what they're trying to do. Once the film's properly underway that threat of disaster does seem a little over egged, and it could have done with a little more clarity on the exact nature of the challenge (how many timezones, which route, how many hours, why that's quite hard, etc). But full marks to Citizen for an arresting start and some lush production values.

The film links well to the product too: a new satellite-enabled timezone auto-reactive device, which, though sounding nifty, must have a rather limited market. Given that most of us arrive in a new timezone by plane, boat or train I struggled to think of anyone who would actually need this product, beyond the obvious candidates of lorry drivers and said captains of planes, boats and, er trains. Yeah, train captains

But I did think of someone else.

Imagine you're an intelligence operative deep undercover and taking part in a wild, elaborate and spinning tribal dance atop a mountain directly on an unmanned and rudimentally delineated border between rural Turkey and Iran (a time difference of 1.5 hrs within a step). And through a combination of dizziness and misadventure you lose your bearings just moments before a crucial rendezvous with a fellow agent at an exact time either side of the border. Plausible eh? Well, if you're that person in that scenario, then this watch is for you.

Or perhaps if you were chasing sunsets in a plane across timezones…

Whatevs. The good thing is that Citizen only reveal the watch at the end, saving us and the story from another potentially forced and famously uncomfortable placement of a watch.