Projects matching: John Akomfrah

Synopsis

Based on the award-winning book ‘Scala Cinema 1978-1993’ by Jane Giles (FAB Press, 2018) this feature-length big screen documentary tells the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll rep house which inspired a generation during Britain's turbulent Thatcher years.
The film combines 50 new interviews with diverse audience members who went on to become filmmakers, musicians, writers, actors and artists, combined with previously unseen archive material and iconic movie clips.
With its universal themes of youthful discovery and the underdog vs. the establishment, this is no nostalgia trip but rather a film of universal relevance with clear parallels between then and now. Above all, it's a hilarious and joyous celebration of cinema-going.
Official Selection Il Cinema Ritrovato Bologna 2023 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

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.

Filmmaker John Akomfrah uses the rich and complex mood created by Miles Davis’s trumpet to root a masterful tapestry of newly filmed material, archival imagery, excerpts from television programs, home movies, and family photographs to create this lyrical and emotionally powerful portrait of the life and philosophy of this influential theorist. Like a fine scotch, The Stuart Hall Project is smooth, complicated, and euphorically pleasing. It taps into a singular intelligence to extract the tools we need to make sense of our lives in the modern world (Sundance).

Synopsis

Twenty years after his departure to the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus sets off an epic journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey - the narrative reference point for John Akomfrah's unusual and genre defying story about chance, fate and redemption.
 
Structured as an allegorical fable and loosely inspired by existential science fiction, The Nine Muses is a stylised, unusual and idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic.
 
Divided into nine overlapping musical chapters and mixing a vast array of archival material, The Nine Muses is a modern recasting of Homer's epic as a 'song cycle' about journeys, migration, memory and the power of elegy.

Synopsis

Digitopia is a short film that goes in search of the emotional undercurrents of the digital domain. It is a film about a man living between the analogue and digital worlds, a man who works in the former but seeks his pleasures in the latter.

Synopsis

A Death In The Family, a film about greed and desire.

Rechard Cajee was a devoted and adoring husband, a postal worker who regularly worked long hours at night at the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.

On 3rd July 1997 Rechard Cajee was found brutally murdered in his bed by his wife and Step Father. He has been shot times in the back of the head.

Rechard Cajee was 30 when he died.

Synopsis

Goldie, the Godfather of Drum and Bass, takes us on a roller coaster ride through his frenetic life. A journey that takes us from Wolverhampton 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.

Synopsis

The 1981 Toxteth riot was the most violent civil disturbance in Britain this century. Over three days more than £11 million worth of property damaged, 1,000 police injured, 500 people arrested. Citizens of the deprived area reacted angrily to high unemployment and years of racial harassment from the police.

Hearing from the rioters, community leaders, victims, local and national government members, this unique documentary recalls how this situation escalated out of control. Ordinary people caught up in the riots gave their views and accounts as to the reasons for, and the inadequacy of the authorities' response to, the days of disorder and destruction.

Synopsis

A highly stylised intimate portrait of the fantastic life of Louis Armstrong. The film charts the story of the innovator, the first great jazz soloist, bandleader, pop star, actor and American cultural ambassador, Louis Armstrong.

Narrated by Danny Glover, The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong is a sensitive insight into the life of the man behind the trumpet; an epic story that spans 70 years from his childhood days on the streets of New Orleans to the glamorous Hollywood films like High Society and Hello Dolly, punctuated by timeless hits like What a Wonderful World and When You're Smiling.

Synopsis

By the side of a road somewhere in the North of England, Sammy stands and waits for the arrival of childhood friends Billy and Ruby. It is twenty years since they all first met, when Sammy was taken by social workers to join an isolated children's home on the dramatic Northumbrian coast. As Sammy gets into Billy and Ruby's car it is immediately clear that, despite the fact that Ruby is recently pregnant, there is violent tension between them and that there is a psychological significance to the mysterious journey that Billy is taking them on.


As the journey progresses, we travel back to the past of their childhood when Sammy, shy and vulnerable and unable to read, joins the home. Billy, confident and charismatic, befriends and guides him through the trials of life in the home and protects him from the violent attentions of the resident bully, Bernie. As Sammy grows in confidence, Billy encourages a romantic attachment with his old girlfriend, the flame-haired Ruby. Using his emotional power over his friends, Billy establishes a ménage a trois that sets them apart from other children in the home. This power is threatened when, in a dramatic incident, Billy tries to defend Sammy from Bernie and gets savagely beaten. The resulting act of revenge is one which will inextricably bind the three friends through the intervening years until the pressure of the past and present combine to force an inevitable resolution.

Synopsis

British filmmaker John Akomfrah imagines the lives of a black man and woman who appear in a sixteenth-century drawing by German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer (TIFF 2012).