John Akomfrah

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.

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.

Interviewees discuss the memories, tastes and experiences that they associate with Africa for a personal vision of the continent.

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, and Stuart Hall.

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.

Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah recounts an experience sailing through French Polynesia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The March is the feature documentary narrated by Denzel Washington about the renowned and historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

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.

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.

An examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology.

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.

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.

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.

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 broadcasted portraits of figures such as Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the evident incongruity between the beguiling ordinariness of the images that represented them with the violent end we know they endured. Through a rare focus on portraiture, Akomfrah seeks to express the diversity of Black characters, characteristics and characterisations that should form the bedrock of any de-colonial or anti-racist future.

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.

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