The grass had gone yellow and the dust settled on everything. Sitting on porch railings on the books beside her. The air felt thick in her throat, but the fingers kept strumming his name.
It felt like something had happened as she wrote him letters she never sent. Words scribbled on envelopes, thoughts written quickly before they disappeared. A thousand love letters moping until the roosters came home. Sometimes she convinced herself that waiting was a kind of love.
The summer was one where the fields turned gold and the days stretched out like forever. She carried him with her the way people carry a song long after the music has ended. Years later, she’d remember very little about that summer. Not the dates, not the weather, not the words she wrote, only the feeling of it. A girl, a dry season, a thousand love letters addressed to somebody already gone.
Shot on Super 8 along South Africa’s eastern coastline, the film by photographer Cadence Hooks began without a script—just a fishing trip, an old camera, and the impulse to capture something beautiful, playful, and nostalgic.
Staying in a villa by the water, Cadence and model Emma Suki swam out to a nearby island and filmed intuitively as they followed wherever the days took them. What began as the idea for a music video ultimately became something more personal: a dreamy, slightly surreal portrait of a summer suspended in time.
Photography and Video by Cadence Hooks @thebushwitch
Featuring Emma Suki @emsukii
