'Cruel' Candid: Kanye West and G.O.O.D. Music Kick It in Qatar
Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. Music family flew to Qatar in April to shoot the film Cruel Summer, but few photos were seen. In one of the rare images from the top-secret set, Mr. West poses with his crew including Pusha T, D’banj, CyHi Da Prynce, Big Sean, Mr Hudson, Hit-Boy, Teyana Taylor, and Q-Tip, who are all dressed in matching black-and-gold attire.
The film premiered to a star-studded crowd including Jay-Z and Kim Kardashian in Cannes earlier this week. Produced, directed, and written by West, the 25-minute short stars Kid Cudi as a car thief who falls in love with a blind Arabian princess.
“I’m not the best director in the world or anything like that, but I had an idea,” said Kanye, who projected the film on seven screens. “I could dream of, one day, this being the way that people watch movies, in this form where it surrounds you and people want to go back and see it more and more because they missed something else to the left and missed something else to the right, and it felt more like the experience of life.”
GQ described the experience as a “mash-up of high-gloss Doug Aitken-style video installations, concert video backing panels, and narrative, big-budget music-videos,” while the L.A. Times said, “The story is secondary to the pyrotechnics, with new music from West and a thumping surround-sound quality that makes a 3-D Michael Bay effort feel like an iPad short.”
The installation will eventually travel to New York and be screened at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar on November 19.
Photo credit: Teyana Taylor