Settling has hardly ever been a characteristic of his. From acting, directing, producing and writing, Asser Yassin’s roadmap has and continues to take him down all sorts of paths. His latest directing experience for “Elekhtelaf ElMoatellef” song from West ElBalad band’s all new album, has been the talk of the town with everyone trying to decode his artistic perspective applied in this like-no-other clip. We had an exciting chat with Asser to get a sneak-peek of all of his ongoing projects.
Being good friends with the Wust El-Balad band, Asser got offered to pick a song and direct it, and soon enough he knew what he wanted to go for. “I loved the song from the very first time I heard it. I knew that I wanted to do something original, that has not been done or seen before. So I created a plot twist with an artistic edge to it without the commercial element of spoon feeding the audience the meaning behind it,” Asser tells.“Different people interpreted the storyline of the song in different ways and that is good; to provoke people to wonder and think,”
“Most of the schools in Egypt do not put much emphasis on visual arts and creativity. So as kids, whenever we would look at any painting, we would automatically say, what does the artist mean? Well this particular question is wrong in its core. Art does not necessarily have to mean something, It should just influence you. You might realize this influence now, or you might see it later, but eventually it should just make you feel something,” he adds.
“Art does not necessarily have to mean something, It should just influence you”
What is worth mentioning is that this is not Asser’s first directing experience, as he has collaborated with his long-time college friend Abu a couple of years back on the song “Ahwak”. “This music video means a lot to me, a lot of my loved ones participated in this project including my wife, brother and bestfriend,” Asser says.
There is a remarkable leap in Asser’s career towards exploring different fields of art, including the launching of his new creative hub “Aranzad” for online content and branding. “A couple of years back I decided that creativity is the origin of everything. God is the most creative of all and to follow him is to be a creator of beauty and art,”
“This company allows me to be a doer, to use my own two hands and tools to bring my visions to life. Back in college, I studied mechanical engineering and majored in production. I have the tools and knowledge of science,logic and creativity to produce anything,” he adds.
“God is the most creative of all and to follow him is to be a creator of beauty and art”
And of course we were all curious to know what the name stands for. “Aranzad is basically a flower that was discovered in 2014 on mars. The weird thing about this flower, is that it produces the same intensity of light that it gets. But most importantly, this flower does not exist, we created it. We saw it and we made it have a definition. This is the goal of this company, we create things and make them believable,”
Knowing that something great is cooking, we had to ask Asser about the movie “Torab Elmas” (Diamond Dust) and his character Taha ElZahar whom we know he has been studying for approximately 2 years now. “I feel very optimistic about this movie, all the right factors are in place for it to turn into a perfect piece of work. Screenwriter Ahmed Mourad has worked on almost 14 drafts now, I have taken my time to understand the complexity of my character, and together we reached a scary level of detail. I now even have Taha’s perfume!,” Asser tells.
Feature Image Credit: Remon ElMarkiz Photography