There is something about New York City in black in white. Add to that a subject as fundamentally captivating as Norwegian-American actress Kristine Frøseth and you have intangible magic in excess.

“The idea was to portray a fragment of Kristine’s bubbly and magnetic personality, all the while celebrating the beauty of the city she lives in, in the wake of its reopening” says director Rebecca Fourteau, who shot the film around Frøseth’s own neighbourhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn as we shot our editorial by Ellen von Unwerth. “I wanted to reference a few of the countless iconic ways New York has been portrayed in film.”

For the voiceover, which finds Frøseth writing a letter to a family member back in Norway, Fourteau drew inspiration from the late filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose 1977 documentary News from Home is centred around the director’s letters to her mother, in Brussels. The result is a nostalgia-tinged film that is at once earnestly optimistic and impossibly charming.

Styled primarily in Chanel — Frøseth is an ambassador for the Parisian house — the actress embodies the vibrancy of the most singularly energetic city on the planet.