Jesper Just

JESPER JUST

 MANO A MANO

In highly emotive films Jesper Just explores the relationship between adults, predominantly men. His works deal with taboos, forbidden feelings and with challenging stereotypes.

Bliss and Heaven, 2004

Description
A young man is walking through a ripe, yellow cornfield, a deep blue heaven in the background, with crosscuts to humming high-voltage lines and a large lorry approaching a lone transformer station in the middle of the cornfield. The lorry driver alights, wearing jeans and a white vest. He looks around, opens the tailboard and disappears into the lorry’s large room.

About the work
The film plays out in a heavily symbolic universe which may be a recognisable reality but in which atmosphere and plot are so unusual that normality and our expectations nonetheless are turned upside down. Jesper Just's film follows a young man on a wondrous physical and mental journey towards greater knowledge, and thus confidentiality, of an older man's secret life and sexuality.
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On Just' art in general
With very few exceptions, the protagonists of Just's works are men doing unusual acts in unusual surroundings, be it two casually dressed men performing the final part of Verdi's opera 'La Traviata' with great pathos at a dreary concrete underpass in Copenhagen or a group of men visiting a strip club with no women and where the men only have eyes for each other.
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Literature 
“Jesper Just: Film Works 2001-2007”, Sophie von Olfers, 2007
”Something to Love”, Holger Reenberg og Gry Høngsmark Knudsen, Herning Kunstmuseum, 2005
”Matisse & - Jesper Just, Aino Kannisto, Malene Landgren”, Tina Nygaard, Statens Museum for Kunst, København, 2006