As promised, Kanye West debuted his new short film ”Cruel Summer” at the Cannes Film Festival in France on Wednesday (May 23). The experimental piece, which bears the same name as his upcoming G.O.O.D. Music compilation album, got a first look during a pretty fancy shindig.
Made in association with the Doha Film Institute, Cruel Summer stars West’s GOOD Music protege Kid Cudi as a bloke of bad stock. Dad was a car thief – Kid’s desperate not to follow in his footsteps, so instead he walks through a sparkly purple door into the middle of the desert. Men on horseback arrest him. He’s taken to a palace full of fruit. A blind girl plucks a giant guitar string. Cudi’s wrapped in bandages. A hawk flies. In, ultra, slow, motion. Cudi resolves to cure his love of her blindness. The cure for blindness is a remix of a song by Coldplay.
Kanye on the film’s vision:
“It related to a post-Steve Jobs, post-Windows era, where we’re always on our BlackBerry in a ball game or at the movies. I was very particular about having the screens separate, where your mind puts the screens back together, the way you put memories together. I’m not the best director in the world, but I had an idea that I thought would be amazing to inspire people, like a dream of one day this being the way people watch movies. You know, [Quentin] Tarantino doing a movie like this or a horror movie like this, animation, 3-D … in this form that surrounds you. People want to go back and see it more and more because they missed something to their left or to their right, and it feels more like the experience of life.”
