John Akomfrah is associated with: Listening All Night to the Rain
Listening All Night To The Rain continues John Akomfrah's abiding interest in post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the sonic. Drawing its title from Chinese writer and artist Su Dongpo's (1037 - 1101) poetry that ...
Watch NowTackling the ecological implications of settler colonialism, extractive capitalism and the extinction of microorganisms, this multi-screen installation digs into the oral as well as representational history of various Indigenous cultures. ...
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In his new work on five screens, "Becoming Wind", Akomfrah creates an allegorical representation of the Garden of Eden and its disappearance. In elegiac black-and-white scenes, the installation evokes a past when an abundant diversity of plant and animal s ...
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Triptych (2020) is a homage to the the radical, political album, 'We Insist!' (1960) by the jazz musician Max Roach – the ideas of which prefigured the themes that became the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements. The catalyst for this film was the b ...
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Commissioned for the inaugural Ghana pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Four Nocturnes (2019) forms the third part of a trilogy of films including the renowned Vertigo Sea (2015) and Purple (2017) that explore the complex intertwined relationship between hum ...
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Commemorateing the millions of African soldiers, labourers and carriers participated in the First World War on the African continent and on the Western Front in Europe. ...
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A three-channel video installation, working with the themes of risk, hybridity and the unfathomable to explore the city of New Orleans through the remarkable life and times of Charles "Buddy" Bolden, the first person known to have explored the sonic tonali ...
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Purple is a six-channel video installation addressing climate change, human communities and the wilderness. At a time when greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at their highest levels in history, with people experiencing the significant impac ...
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The Airport, a three-screen film installation conceived as a meditation on Greek history and its recent financial crisis, set around the landscapes of Southern Greece and an abandoned airfield near Athens, recalls the work of two filmmaking greats: Stanley ...
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Auto Da Fé is a diptych that looks at migration through the lens of religious persecution. Presented as a poetic period drama, the film presents a series of eight historical migrations over the last 400 years, starting with the little known 1654 fleeing o ...
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Tropikos transforms the landscape of the Tamar Valley in the South West of England into a sixteenth-century port of exploration on the African continent in order to reveal the deep-rooted and darker history of the river and the UK's role in the development ...
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Vertigo Sea is a three-screen film installation that explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls 'the sublime seas'. Fusing archival material, readings from classical sources and newly shot footage, Akomfrah's piece focuses on the disorder and cruelty of the w ...
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Transfigured Night draws its inspiration from two sources of the same name – Verklärte Nacht – the German poem by Richard Dehmel from 1896 and the musical composition by Arnold Schoenburg in 1899. Using the five-part structure of both the poem and th ...
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Through juxtaposing and layering archival footage with text, music and photographs, The Unfinished Conversation crosses the memory landscape of Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, to reflect on the nature and complexities of memory an ...
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Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema. ...
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A short film made for "Venezia 70 - Future Reloaded". A man recounts the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. ...
Watch NowThe March is the feature documentary narrated by Denzel Washington about the renowned and historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. ...
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A person's culture is something that is often described as fixed or defined and rooted in a particular region, nation, or state. Stuart Hall, one of the most preeminent intellectuals on the Left in Britain, updates this definition as he eloquently theorize ...
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Documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The film tells the story of how the march for jobs and freedom began, speaking to the people who ...
Watch NowPeripeteia (Greek: περιπέτεια; a reversal of circumstances, or turning point) is a moving visualization of a black man and woman that appear in a 16th century drawing by the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. John Akomfrah uses the film t ...
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A homage to Russian film giant Andrei Tarkovsky, this work integrates excerpts of soundtracks from Tarkovsky's films with a slideshow of landscapes shot by Akomfrah and an evocative sculptural installation. Working with long time collaborator, sound artist ...
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Part documentary, part personal essay, this experimental film combines archive imagery with the striking wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrant experience coming into the UK from 1960 onwards. ...
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Part documentary, part personal essay, this experimental film combines archive imagery with the striking wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrant experience coming into the UK from the 1950s onwards. ...
Watch NowThe Genome Chronicles is an epic investigation, unbounded by traditional notions of time, into the relationship between image and memory. Fusing personal archival material of Donald Rodney with newly shot footage and material from Smoking Dogs Films perso ...
Watch NowStan Tracey: The Godfather of British Jazz is a portrait of one musician's lifetime achievement. In a career spanning 60 years as pianist and composer, Tracey (1926 – 2013), recalls his life with unprecedented honesty. The film combines a mix of archive ...
Watch NowDrama about a man who lives in an analogue world but seeks to fulfil his desires in a digital world. ...
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Louis Armstrong is one of the most recognizable figures in jazz, with his incomparable trumpet playing and beaming smile. This video profiles Armstrong from his humble beginnings in New Orleans through his career as America's Ambassador of Good Will. Film ...
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John Akomfrah's seminal Riot traces the riots in Liverpool during July 1981 in a climate of economic recession under Thatcher's regime. Akomfrah captures this turning point in Britain's struggle towards multicultural democracy through interviews revealing ...
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Speak Like a Child, the feature film debut of documentary director John Akomfrah, explores the intense friendship that evolves between three troubled teenagers growing up in an isolated children's home on the Northumbrian coast. The desolate beauty of the ...
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A vivid meditation on cloning, death, memory and media set on an remote Scottish island. A short film on the millennium's end commissioned by BBC TV. ...
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Goldie, the godfather of drum and bass takes us on a roller coaster ride through his frenetic life. A journey that takes us from Wolver Hampton to Tokyo, Miami to Hong Kong; through his years in council care and his life as a musician and international pop ...
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An examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology. ...
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The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fic ...
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The Black Audio Film Collective's seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants th ...
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Black filmmaker John Akomfrah believes that, for too long, being English has meant being white. In an attempt to show Englishness from the point of view of mixed-race English people, he visits Liverpool, one of England's oldest multicultural communities. ...
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The tumultuous life of the controversial 1960s black revolutionary (and convicted murderer) Michael X is illustrated by a kaleidoscopic melding of sound and images. The radically discordant free jazz soundtrack provides a surreal counterpoint to the mix of ...
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Short documentary about Pakistani musician, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997), leading exponent of Sufi devotional qawwali singing. ...
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Focuses on the Kwame Nkrumah era in Ghanaian history and paints a portrait of a female African government minister forced into exile after a coup d'état in 1966. Two decades later, she returns to confront the country she left behind. ...
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The Black Audio Film Collective's acclaimed essay film, 'Handsworth Songs', examines the 1985 race riots in Handsworth and London. Interweaving archival photographs, newsreel clips, and home movie footage, the film is both an exploration of documentary aes ...
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Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 2 – Images of Nationality is the second of a two-part 35mm slide- tape text entitled Expeditions; part one is entitled Signs of Empire. The work toured England from November ...
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Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 1 – Signs of Empire is the first of a two-part 35mm slide-tape text entitled Expeditions; part two is entitled Images of Nationality. The work toured England from November 19 ...
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This feature-length big screen documentary tells the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll repertory cinema which inspired a generation during Britain's turbulent Thatcher years. ...
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Interviewees discuss the memories, tastes and experiences that they associate with Africa for a personal vision of the continent. ...
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A two part documentary that details the contribution of black and Asian people to television history from the birth of television in 1936 to 1992. Interviewees include: Pearl Connor, Thomas Baptiste, Lenny Henry, Norman Beaton, Horace Ové, Carmen Munroe, ...
Watch NowBlack filmmaker John Akomfrah believes that, for too long, being English has meant being white. In an attempt to show Englishness from the point of view of mixed-race English people, he visits Liverpool, one of England's oldest multicultural communities. ...
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