Photo: Molly Burmeister
Melbourne alt-pop-rock artist SASHA SUMMERS today releases the music video for her sophomore single, Belladonna (This Is How You Die). Written, directed, styled and edited entirely by SUMMERS herself, the video is an extension of her core artistic philosophy: that the phrase “Written and Directed by Sasha Summers” belongs on everything she creates.
“As a film school student I find it really important that my work has my little fingerprints all over it. The phrase ‘Written and Directed by Sasha Summers’ is very important to me.”
Shot across three distinctly charged locations – a friend’s astrology and tarot space, her first ballet school, and a gothic church in Melbourne – the video leans fully into Belladonna’s dark feminine aesthetic. Occult, goth-coquette and moody, the visual world Summers has built is one she had mapped out before the first note was even recorded.
The clip’s conceptual anchor is drawn from a recurring nightmare Summers has experienced, of trying desperately to move, to get up, and being completely unable to. No matter how hard she tries, her legs won’t respond. It’s a visceral, disorienting image of powerlessness and the video transforms it into something defiant.
“The Craft walked so I could run. I have this recurring nightmare where I either can’t breathe or walk. No matter how much I try to move my legs, even dragging one leg with my hands one at a time, I can’t really move. It’s about getting back up anyway, even though you can’t walk. To take your power back one way or another. Even when everything is against you.”
A current film school student, Summers has cited David Lynch and Sofia Coppola as key visual touchstones, directors who made their own rules and left meaning open to interpretation. That same instinct drives Belladonna’s visual world. Nothing here is accidental, from the locations to the styling to the edit. Every choice belongs to her.
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