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Genesis Owusu – GTFO

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From the opening moments of Uncle Friendly's claustrophobic promo for Genesis Owusu, you might be forgiven for thinking it will be a cerebral meditation.

However, as soon as Owusu (putting in an excellent performance) is pitted against his cockroach foe, the serenity stops and the creativity bottled up in Friendly's six-year music video hiatus is unleashed.

Relishing in the surreal storytelling, the AIRBAG director (real name Rhett Wade-Ferrell) amps up GTFO's battle of rage and resistance with some crunchy camera moves and a flagrant disregard for homecare.

But what of the bug? “Seeing as we live in Sydney," explains Wade-Ferrell, "we figured capturing a cockroach wouldn’t be hard, but the week before the shoot the cockroaches of Sydney must have heard what we were planning because no one saw a single roach that week.”

“I kid you not, at 5am the day of the shoot I’m texting the production designer five minutes before I go to set and we don’t know what we are going to do because no one has caught a cockroach. And I turned on the coffee machine and this big perfect beautiful cockroach walked out of the back of the machine and literally stopped right in front of me. I was already holding the coffee glass so I just put it over him and he got the job.”

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