‘Film for Her’ leaves a prying need for adventure and the whirlwind of life’s ardors

Orion Carloto is a writer, poet, creator and author living in Los Angeles. The photo and cover design were created by the 23-year-old as well. Melody Bathaee/Lariat

Orion Carloto bleeds her experiences onto the beckoning page, covering the good and the bad in her memoir with poetry and photographs that have readers dreaming

Besides being the first choice for an aesthetically pleasing coffee table book, the 23-year-old writer and online creator, Orion Carloto, adds bulbs of emotion to her pages. Emotions seethe through our once mundane life experiences by adding virility and adventure back to moments we might have otherwise thought unimportant in her second book, “Film for Her.”

Mixing 85-millimeter film photography taken from her early adulthood travels and piecing together words ribboned with romantic semantics, “Film for Her” takes on a role of escape to a more vivid and lively routine to life – one many of us crave in the present time, in both political and social sense.

In a pine green indentation, the hardcover reads the title whilst featuring a black and white photo of Carloto holding her camera used to capture the fragments of time scattered throughout most of the pages. At first glance, the simplicity of each landscape and person shared alongside the poems emphasizes her message of enjoying the times in between the highs and lows we face throughout our time on this earth.

Although most adults can reach the relatability of her author’s note, the poems themselves show a timeline of Carloto’s life during her early 20s. This makes the book a perfect time frame for those emerging into the wild and new encounters of adulthood.

Thankfully, the layout of the memoir is underwhelming as each short story and line is heavy with reflective diction of each feeling she endures. Pain, sorrow, excitement and curiosity fill each narrative with a common theme of love also present in her first poetry book, “Flux,” released in October of 2017.

While her first entry into the writing industry with “Flux” took on a more somber and desolate path inspired by the grief of a broken heart, “Film for Her” gives leeway into a conjunction of various moods based on entanglements from her journeys. The remote contacts she describes isolate specific feelings that encapsulate readers into her every sentiment. These moments range from an entire night’s worth of celebrating out at a bar in the limelight of New York City to a few seconds in the Chateau Marmont, where she scribbles down a pulse of bliss next to one of her lovers.

The writings are of pure romance, where she learns to grow and appreciate how love can take on different forms. “Film for Her” is like two pieces of a heart: one incomplete without the other. The smiles she captured of her beloveds, the plane tickets and handwritten notes glued in like a scrapbook – and the candid light of a cigarette on a Parisian morning – tie together the essence of her essays and thoughts in a way that sends an abrupt message to simply live.

“Be alive” is what Carloto sings to readers with each flip of the 177 pages book of memories.

Fans of Carloto knew the life portrayed on her fashion-forward Instagram and YouTube platforms were to come about eventually within another book, hopefully as impactful as “Flux.” But adding a visual element to her poetry brought a more desired effect when it came to immersing oneself in the second extension of her identity.

Words of advice and triumph litter the pages, making for an exciting and dreamlike state when consuming “Film for Her” because of the people, places and memories encapsulated in each photograph. Written for dreamers and romantics, the poetry and film memoir collides coming of age anecdotes with reflective musings of her own creation to share Carloto’s growth and the constructions of her identity.

In hopes of inspiring her readers to create and love endlessly, “Film for Her” unveils the lessons of life revealed in the most ordinary of moments, between the exhilaration and marvels it has to offer.

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