Sampha Can’t Go Back in latest promo

SMUGGLER director Saad Moosajee creates a spectral video for track Can’t Go Back from Sampha’s latest album Lahai.

Moosajee uses a combination of live action alongside impressive CGI / VFX to bend time and reality, culminating a wonderfully ambiguous visual. 

Director Saad Moosajee said: "Can’t Go Back is a story about trying to get back to yourself. The film was inspired by the idea of time traveling through memories, moving forwards and backwards through a metaphysical world. 

Sampha’s initial brief was expansive, mentioning everything from wormholes to the spirituality of nature. I drew inspiration from both magic realism and afro-futurist literature, imagining a visual style equally stark and surreal, centered around light and shadow. A key visual inspiration was cameraless photography, Infrared light, the photograms of laszlo moholy-nagy, the black paint known as Vantablack. 

It was through these types of natural visual phenomenon of Light and shadow, that I attempted to visualize this interplay between the natural spiritual qualities of nature and the more scientific elements of the universe mentioned in Sampha’s initial brief."

"It was an amazing experience working with Sampha, who is to me not just an amazingly talented and innovative musician but also such a grounded and curious individual. I have nothing but respect for the way he approaches music, how with each project he carves new sonic territories that are also emotive. He gave our team ample creative freedom to experiment and to find something unique. We spent a lot of time in the preproduction phase dreaming up visuals for the world, discussing the art direction and talking about these critical concepts of time, space and memory.

I think the most interesting thing about the approach is the different explorations of light and shadow across the different mediums of the piece. It’s interesting to think about the initial seed inspirations of cameraless photography and photograms, and how those ideas of light and shadow are explored throughout the piece, whether in the physical tree elements painted in matte white, the black hole lens refractions, or the glitch inversions of Sampha that almost turn him into two dimensional linework. 

At times Can’t Go Back is almost like watching an inversion, that very simple notion of black and white and white and black, flipping forwards and backwards across mediums that are tangible and intangible, is the most interesting thing to me about the film."