ACTRESS - KARMA & DESIRE

A story of love and missed connections in iconic LA locations for the electronic musician's latest album.

Already hailed as one of the "finest electronic music albums of 2020" Actress' new album Karma & Desire needed no further promotion. But a week after its applauded release, LA-based director Lee Bootee dropped this short film featuring some of the artists in the album – Zsela, Sampha and Actress himself – in a mysterious, moody, noirish tale of love and isolation in a dystopian but romantic world.

"We filmed in Los Angeles over three days," says Bootee. "It was in September, the sky was still smoky from the fires. My friend Devin is an engineer and pilot so the first location was at a private airport. He gave us access to film around his hangar and aircraft, which became a character in the film. Other locations include a super secret mansion, private beach in Malibu, and a rooftop parking lot in the heart of the city."

The collaboration took life after an online conversation in which Actress approached Bootee with the vision of collapsing the album into a visual world, and from there the two artists sent each other bits of writing, ideas, images, videos and feelings.

"I listened to the album driving around the city, crying over a heartbreak, over and over and over," says Bootee. "The album spoke to me, it became the soundtrack to this period of transition; isolation, love, loss, atoms, pixels. I took our conversations both creative and personal and visualized a broken narrative. It evolved pretty quickly and organically. In moments, it felt like telepathy or a shared understanding of energy transmission

The challenge was to strip down from my tendency to oversaturate and maintain streamlined visuals that compliment the music rather than battle with it. I wanted to keep it pretty raw—there's sincerity and a sort of complicated simplicity to the music and I wanted to maintain that visually."

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