On The Cusp, Longlist - Music Video

Wassulu Don

Justyna Obasi

Love Song

The song is powerful yet gentle, like a daydream. A letter from home. For this video Justyna wanted Oumou Sangaré to come home and shoot it in Africa. She wanted to translate the song into a powerful video around homecoming and the feeling of home - that goes beyond blood relations and extends to friendships and community. Creating tension by juxtaposing past and contemporary layers with each other. For this video we had to think of cultural heritage movies by Diop Mambety, Ousmane Sembene or Abderrahmane Sissako and how we can carry those beautiful documentations on African life and family structures into our current visual reality and touch people in and out of Africa. We envisioned poetic images like memories that are not tied to a specific time or place, rather focus on the feeling. Images that are stripped down to the core of human emotions. Oumou is a powerful feminist icon and has used her platform to speak out about women’s rights for decades. The concept for the video was to create different vignettes with strong female characters and juxtapose them creating a unique visual canon about home from a female perspective. Shot in a 4:3 format the scenes appear like paintings or windows into women’s lives, loosely connected by the same feeling of bittersweet love, joy and pride. Artistic, curious, yet visually grounded in reality.

A visual artist by training, Justyna employs colours, textures, and format to serve a narrative purpose. Every project is a new place, a new adventure, holding beauty waiting to be discovered and revealed. Growing up with Polish and Nigerian parents in multiple countries and environments contributed to her gift for salvaging moments of beauty wherever they appear. Justyna was trained to direct actors at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Beaconsfield and yet she enjoys putting real people in front of a camera to feed on authentic and unfiltered emotion. With her intuitive and fearless approach to filmmaking, Justyna is a beautifully intimate and equally dynamic young voice in commercials.