The Airport

Riot

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.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X

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.

Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks

This groundbreaking documentary unlocks the hidden psychology of J.M.W. Turner through his 37,000 private sketches, drawings, and watercolours – an extraordinary archive that reveals the man behind the masterpieces. For the first time on television, these pages – Including erotic sketches previously thought to have been destroyed – are used as a window into Turner’s inner world, exposing his private thoughts, creative obsessions and emotional life. Rarely writing about himself, Turner left behind few clues to his personality. But in his sketchbooks, his restless imagination and vulnerabilities come vividly to life. They guide viewers through Turner’s life and art, revealing how his 37,000 sketches not only chart his creative evolution but also provide an unprecedented psychological portrait of a man both visionary and vulnerable.

Acts Of Faith

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 of Sephardic Jews from Catholic Brazil to Barbados. As the film develops, we are presented with tale after tale of populations being displaced along religious lines, right up to the present day migrations from Hombori, Mali and Mosul, Iraq. Religion, persecution and migration are, it seems, old and continuing bedfellows. The work was filmed on location in Barbados, but the landscape is deliberately anonymous, reflecting the universal nature of these stories.

Vertigo Sea

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.

Testament

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.

Handsworth Songs

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.

Venice 70: Future Reloaded

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.

Speak Like a Child

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.

Becoming Wind

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 species still existed on the planet, while also directing a gaze at the precarious humancentric ecosystem of the Anthropocene, the current epoch of climate change.

Four Nocturnes

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 humanity’s destruction of the natural world and our destruction of ourselves. Using Africa’s declining elephant populations as its narrative spine, Four Nocturnes questions mortality, loss, fragmented identity, mythology and memory through poetic visuals that survey the landscape of African cultural heritage.

Transfigured Night

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 the composition to reflect on the key moments and events which have shaped postcolonial histories, Transfigured Night mirrors the relationship between postcolonial subject and state with that of Dehmel’s lovers – speaking to the fleeting promises and ensuing disappointments of the post-colonial state.

Mnemosyne

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.

Purple

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.

Precarity

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 tonalities of the music we now call jazz.

At the Graveside of Tarkovsky

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 Trevor Mathison, Akomfrah creates an environment thick with longing and the evasive and yet inescapable presence of death. At the Graveside of Tarkovsky is a mixed media installation with sound and single channel HD colour video.