Premiere: Petra Glynt - "Sour Paradise"

Petra Glynt's new video is a hypnotizing and operatic hippie acid trip that has a longer list of credits than most short films. At every turn in this video you're treated to a rush of colored smoke, flowers, chains hanging from the ceiling while dudes in freaky costumes swing around sledgehammers, flowers on fire, more colored smoke, and crazy kaleidoscope lens effects. It's a bit too much to make sense of, in a good way, so we reached out to Petra aka Alexandra Mackenzie to have her describe the video in her own words.

The "Sour Paradise" video began when Blake Macfarlane messaged me out of the blue last January asking if I'd like to work together…we didn't know each other, but I checked out his work, thought it was dope, we met and I thought he was dope and we became good friends. Now we even live together…but backing up, the ideas for the video came together through a number of brain-storming sit-downs between Blake and myself but were ultimately inspired by the message of the song itself.

The song is open but also militant at the same time, militant in it's urgency to see change in the world. It tries to express the disconnect between our relationship to the land we live on and asks us to question the validity of the system our civilization has been built upon and where it's taking us. The song is meant to empower in circumstances that can be disempowering. We didn't want to come across as too preachy or confrontational while maintaining an artful/magical approach to video making. Amidst all the inequality in the world and damage that is being done to our planet, people need positivity. We need to celebrate our likeness and freedoms we all share, that no one can take away from us- that is the power of music, art, and dance. The video has something ominous, but it is intended to be a celebration of the power of community. We had a very small budget that we generated through a show/dance party fundraiser called "Paradise" at the Comfort Zone in Toronto back in September.

So there you have it! See below for a complete list of the wonderful people who helped make this video happen.

Director + Editor + VFX: Blake Macfarlane
Producer: Maya Bedward
Camera: Adam Bischoff
1st AD: Ross Kerr-Wilson
2nd AD: Damian Lebiedzinski
Special thanks to: Jen Orenstein, Azzurra Gelfand, Kristyn Gelfand, Angela Vargas, Aurora Cowie, Gina Minugh, Ryan Jeans, Caitlin Woelfle-O'Brien, Zoe Alexis-Abrams, Lido Pimienta, Wolfgang Nessel, Victoria Cheong, Vanessa Nicholas, Caroline Macfarlane, Kiera Boult, Kvesche Bijons-Ebacher, Simon Schlesinger, Sarah Friend, Mojan Jianfar, Jessica Kahkaru, Carlos Rodriguez, and Patty de Frutos