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Kayhan Lannes Özmen joins ELEANOR US
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The director Özmen will be represented by ELEANOR in the United States across commercial and branded projects.
ELEANOR welcomes Kayhan Lannes Özmen to its US roster, a Rio de Janeiro-born director whose work subverts the surreal through rhythm, restraint, and images that feel elegant until they begin to unsettle.
In Özmen’s films, surrealism is never decoration. It is pressure. A way of bending the familiar until something more psychological begins to show through. His images can be beautiful, cinematic, and exquisitely composed, but they rarely behave as cleanly as they first appear.
There is often something just beneath the surface applying force. A tension in the atmosphere. A detail that feels slightly too deliberate. A visual choice that turns the ordinary into a warning. That is what makes Kayhan such an unusual suspect. He does not use the surreal to escape reality. He uses it to expose reality’s stranger motives.
Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and Turkish father, Özmen was raised between Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom, a life of cultural movement that gave his work its particular sense of distance and intimacy. His point of view feels globally shaped without becoming placeless. He understands elegance, but not as polish alone. He understands beauty, but rarely lets it stay innocent.
After studying visual arts at PUC-Rio and filmmaking at NYU Tisch, Özmen developed a practice across fiction, documentaries, music videos, commercials, and fashion films. Across those forms, rhythm became one of his most distinct signatures. Not rhythm as soundtrack, though music is deeply present in his visual language, but rhythm as control. The cut, the gesture, the reveal, the moment an image stays composed long enough to become strange.
His acclaimed short Girl on the Escalator, created for NOWNESS and based on Charles Bukowski’s poem, captures that instinct with unnerving precision. The film takes the surreal not as a dream state, but as a deadpan condition. The strange is allowed to stand plainly in the frame, almost too calmly, until the viewer is forced to reconcile the absurdity with the emotional truth beneath it. The result is haunting because it refuses to over-explain itself.
That refusal runs through Özmen's commercial work as well. In films for brands including Ford, Smirnoff, Stella Artois, Old Spice, Netflix, Absolut, Eisenbahn, and Ninho, he brings avant-garde instinct into commercial worlds without losing clarity. A simple idea is pushed just far enough to become visually compelling. A familiar product space is bent toward atmosphere. A brand world becomes more memorable because it has been allowed to feel slightly unstable.
For Ford Mustang Dark Horse, Kayhan’s command of rhythm becomes force. Built around obsession, speed, and the pressure of a single second, the film transforms performance driving into something almost psychological. The machine is not simply shown in motion. It is pursued, studied, cut against time itself. Every second feels loaded. Every edit becomes part of the obsession. The work was named a 2026 CICLOPE Latino finalist in Editing, a fitting recognition for a director whose images often find their danger through timing.
His work for UNDO Jaguar moves through another kind of force entirely. Animal instinct, transformation, and cinematic control converge in a film where the image feels physical before it becomes symbolic. Again, the surreal is not a flourish. It is a disruption with purpose. The brand world becomes charged because Özmen knows how to let the uncanny enter without overwhelming the idea.
That balance is central to his craft. Özmen’s films are insistently cinematic, but they also feel close. Real. Human. His work can hold the avant-garde and the intimate in the same frame, creating images that feel composed enough to trust and strange enough to question.
“Kayhan has a very rare relationship with the surreal,” says ELEANOR President Sophie Gold. “He never treats it as atmosphere alone. He uses it with discipline, rhythm, and emotional intelligence. His images are elegant, but there is always something underneath them applying pressure. That tension is exactly what makes his work so distinctive.”
In 2016, Özmen was invited to direct the official Opening Ceremony film for the Rio Summer Olympic Games, a project that brought his cinematic eye to a global cultural stage. The film was later shortlisted for the International Emmy Awards, expanding a body of work already defined by scale, precision, and a deep interest in the emotional charge of images.
For Özmen, joining ELEANOR marks a new chapter in a career that has moved across continents, forms, and visual languages while remaining unmistakably his own.
“I’ve been building toward the U.S. market for a while, and Eleanor feels like the right house for that next chapter,” says Özmen. “What stood out immediately was Sophie’s eye. She reads the beauty, the disruption, and the tension in my work with a precision most people miss. That kind of creative intelligence is exactly what I want behind me when I’m pitching to agencies. I’m really glad to be here.”
As brands continue searching for work that can feel cinematic without becoming generic, strange without becoming obscure, and beautiful without becoming passive, Özmen brings a singular visual intelligence to the US market. His work does not force the surreal into view. It lets the image remain composed until something inside the frame begins to disturb the logic of what we are seeing.
Özmen will be represented by ELEANOR in the United States across commercial and branded projects.
