John Akomfrah
1957 (67 лет)Goldie: When Saturn Returns
John Akomfrah
Goldie, Brim
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 star. Along the way we meet his family, his collaborators and his celebrated friends, David Bowie and Noel Gallagher.
Goldie: When Saturn Returns
Purple
John Akomfrah
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 impacts of climate change, including shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather events, Akomfrah’s Purple brings a multitude of ideas into conversation. These include animal extinctions, the memory of ice, the plastic ocean and global warming. Akomfrah has combined hundreds of hours of archival footage with newly shot film and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation.
Purple
Vertigo Sea
John Akomfrah
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 whaling industry and juxtaposes it with scenes of many generations of migrants making epic crossings of the ocean for a better life.
Vertigo Sea
Who Needs a Heart
John Akomfrah
Caroline Burghard, Treva Etienne
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 newsreel and staged footage in this exhilarating experiment in documentary storytelling.
Who Needs a Heart
Tropikos
John Akomfrah
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 and proliferation of the slave trade.
Tropikos
Riot
John Akomfrah
Paul Barber
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 the ghettoisation and racial abuse in Toxteth that escalated with stop-and-search policing tactics following the “sus” laws.
Riot
Speak Like a Child
John Akomfrah
Cal Macaninch, Rachel Fielding
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 coastline is captured in stunning panoramas, while strong performances by the young cast help to create a lyrical and poignant drama.
Speak Like a Child
The Stuart Hall Project
John Akomfrah
Stuart Hall
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 theorizes that cultural identity is fluid—always morphing and stretching toward possibility but also constantly experiencing nostalgia for a past that can never be revisited
The Stuart Hall Project
Handsworth Songs
John Akomfrah
Pervaiz Khan, Meera Syal
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 aesthetics and a broad meditation social and cultural oppression through Britain’s intertwined narratives of racism and economic decline.
Handsworth Songs
Testament
John Akomfrah
Tania Rogers, Evans Oma Hunter
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.
Testament
Stan Tracey: The Godfather of British Jazz
John Akomfrah
Stan Tracey
Stan 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, landscape and interviews with musical giants such as saxophonist Courtney Pine, doyenne Cleo Laine and jazz eminence Humphrey Lyttleton. Stan Tracey’s obituary, published in the Guardian, 6 December 2013 can be viewed here. smokingdogfilms.com
Stan Tracey: The Godfather of British Jazz
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
Franco Maresco, John Akomfrah
Bernardo Bertolucci, Haile Gerima
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.
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
Seven Songs for Malcolm X
John Akomfrah
Darrick Harris, Danny Carter
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 that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.
Seven Songs for Malcolm X
