Damian Lazarus and his band The Ancient Moons have teamed up with Cannes Lions’ gold-winning Lebanese director Jessy Moussallem to reveal the utterly captivating short film ‘Heart of Sky.’
Rather than having a music video produced for the group’s latest album on Crosstown Rebels, Heart of Sky, the band sought to push boundaries by creating a film that would blur the lines between fiction and documentary, while fusing together the worlds of music and storytelling. Shot in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the film showcases the secret lives of the farming communities that illegally cultivate and harvest Lebanese Red hashish. Moussallem beautifully weaves the album’s cosmic 80’s soul house and funk through the stunning imagery of the workers and their landscape.
Lazarus said of the short film, “The cinematic qualities of the Heart of Sky album directed me to find a special filmmaker who could take various strands of the music from the album and weave them together in one visual masterpiece,” he explained. “I wanted to find a cosmic basis for the work, a theme that was universal but also very personal and in Jessy’s idea to film the families of the people working in the Lebanese desert cultivating hashish I felt we had hit on the perfect idea.”
Moussallen revealed that the inspiration for this film came from her first sighting of people in these communities:
While I was scouting for another film in the Bekaa valley a year ago, I came across a beautiful green stretch of marijuana. A group of women laborers were sitting on the ground surrounded by the spiky leaves, taking a break from their work and drinking tea as their children played beside them. The peaceful scene in the controversial setting made a strong impression on me. I lived in the valleys doing research for a month and a half, where I met people from every level of the industry. I spent time in the fields with the farmers, in manufacturing garages with the laborers, with outlaws in hiding, in the homes of small time dealers and the mansions of big time ones. Somehow, I worked my way up until I found myself in the presence of the Middle Easts’ Escobar. After all this, my intuition led me back to the scene and the people that I first met, those who see the red hash as the valley’s gift, the community that tends to the fields.
The short film reveals itself at the cusp of a possible new era for these communities, as the Lebanese government looks to consider legalizing the enormously profitable cannabis industry, said to be worth up to $1bn, to rescue its ailing economy.
Watch ‘Heart of the Sky’ here:
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