Jesper Just

A Vicious Undertow

Jesper Just

Benedikte Hansen, Laura Drasbæk

A Vicious Undertow offers a dreamlike narrative—a vision from a stylish, black and white world where music is a language and fabric patterns enhance the mood and define character. Despite the film’s mysteries, and how much it leaves to our interpretations and imaginations, Just bases his work in real emotions, finding every kind of expression in his actor’s faces, hands, and bodies. Resisting this enigmatic story becomes more difficult with each longing glance, haunting melody, and swooning turn of the camera.

Something to Love

Jesper Just

The protagonists of Something to Love are a young man, an older man, a young woman and an underground parking lot, devoid of people and cars, reminiscent of the sets of many thrillers. The film is charged with a film noire atmosphere and the ghosts of all the mysteries shot in parking lots and staircases.

Bliss and Heaven

Jesper Just

Melodramatic but never campy or over the top and with Hollywood-quality production values, Jesper Just films probe vulnerable, ordinarily well-armored zones of the masculine psyche like grief, same-sex love, Oedipal conflict and spiritual desire.

Intercourses

Jesper Just

The film is set in a suburb of the city of Hangzhou in China, which is built as a full scale architectural copy of parts of the French capital of Paris. In contrast to the many other recreations of cities around the world, people actually live in this area. Here, Chinese signs and lettuce fields clash with a reproduction of the Haussmann boulevards and a smaller version of the iconic Eiffel Tower.

Servitudes

Jesper Just

‘Servitudes' explores the tension between femininity and autonomy in our capitalist society. A young girl (Dree Hemmingway) sits alone in an office eating corn. Her hands are secured by Continuous Passive Motion (CPM) devices which both aid and hinder her ability to eat. As a symbolic nod to the disparity between identity and commodity, the individual and social constructs, the woman in the film’s interaction with the audience waivers between flirtation and apathy.

Sirens of Chrome

Jesper Just

Four Afro-American women drive around the deserted streets of the abandoned city. The palpable tension in the Chrysler reflects the disturbing atmosphere outside. When they come onto the roof of an old theatre, now a parking lot, another woman appears in the picture. Here begins a strange and spellbinding confrontation.

A Voyage in Dwelling

Jesper Just

Benedikte Hansen

The films register as an uneasy mapping of female desire, as they chart the slippage between one woman's actual and imagined sexual self. Just sensitively explores the idea that "the received paradigm of a man's journey is that he always returns to the point of departure expecting to find his home and wife unchanged, unaffected. Benedikte's experience, by contrast, is one of pleasurable displacement - she becomes a nomad in her own mind, never returning to her former status quo." Shot on a remote island and on a dilapidated Polish ferry, the trilogy also features an original soundtrack by Theremin composer Dorit Chrysler and American transgender singer/songwriter, Baby Dee.