John Akomfrah

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Three-screen black and white video installation exploring how individuals and communities have been coping with the pandemic, the radical mobilization seen on the streets and the disruption of cycles of racism, and the increasingly urgent crisis of climate change.

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.

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 organised and participated in it. Using rarely seen archive footage the film reveals the background stories surrounding the build up to the march as well as the fierce opposition it faced from the JFK administration, J Edgar Hoover's FBI and widespread claims that it would incite racial violence, chaos and disturbance. The film follows the unfolding drama as the march reaches its ultimate triumphs, gaining acceptance from the state, successfully raising funds and in the end, organised and executed peacefully.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Peripeteia (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 to give them movement and to imagine their lives and actions.

The 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 personal archive of images and textures to create a poetic personal landscape. Conceived as a “song cycle” in ten distinct but interrelated parts, The Genome Chronicles is organised by music from a variety of genres such as Tibetan chants, Indian Ghazals and post-punk noise pieces. The film uses this montage of sounds to explore overlapping concerns on the ethics of image making, on legacy and inheritance and on the unspoken perils of patrimony and kinship.

Tackling 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.

The 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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