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John Akomfrah, CBE (born 4 May 1957) is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
Total trailers found: 50
02 January 1991
The tumultuous life of the controversial 1960s black revolutionary (and convicted murderer) Michael X is illustrated by a kaleidoscopic melding of sound and images.
01 January 1990
Short documentary about Pakistani musician, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997), leading exponent of Sufi devotional qawwali singing.
01 September 2010
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 1960 onwards.
01 January 1998
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.
01 January 2013
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.
01 October 1993
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.
04 September 1998
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.
28 August 2013
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.
05 October 2012
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.
18 January 2010
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.
01 January 1999
John Akomfrah’s seminal Riot traces the riots in Liverpool during July 1981 in a climate of economic recession under Thatcher’s regime.
16 May 1988
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.
13 April 2021
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.
26 August 2013
The March is the feature documentary narrated by Denzel Washington about the renowned and historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
01 January 1996
The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
11 May 2019
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.
05 January 2024
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.
27 August 1999
Louis Armstrong is one of the most recognizable figures in jazz, with his incomparable trumpet playing and beaming smile.
07 July 1998
A vivid meditation on cloning, death, memory and media set on an remote Scottish island. A short film on the millennium’s end commissioned by BBC TV.
01 December 2018
Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah recounts an experience sailing through French Polynesia.
22 January 2016
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.
22 January 2016
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.
07 March 2014
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.
01 July 2009
The Genome Chronicles is an epic investigation, unbounded by traditional notions of time, into the relationship between image and memory.
22 January 2016
The Airport, a three-screen film installation conceived as a meditation on Greek history and its recent financial crisis, set around the landscapes of Southern Greece and an abandoned airfield near Athens, recalls the work of two filmmaking greats: Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopolous.
30 November 2023
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.
01 April 2008
Interviewees discuss the memories, tastes and experiences that they associate with Africa for a personal vision of the continent.
26 October 2013
Through juxtaposing and layering archival footage with text, music and photographs, The Unfinished Conversation crosses the memory landscape of Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, to reflect on the nature and complexities of memory and identity.
01 January 1984
Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 2 – Images of Nationality is the second of a two-part 35mm slide- tape text entitled Expeditions; part one is entitled Signs of Empire.
20 April 2024
Listening All Night To The Rain continues John Akomfrah’s abiding interest in post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the sonic.
18 January 2013
A person’s culture is something that is often described as fixed or defined and rooted in a particular region, nation, or state.
11 September 1996
An examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology.
19 November 2025
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.
27 June 1992
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.
08 May 1986
The Black Audio Film Collective’s acclaimed essay film, 'Handsworth Songs', examines the 1985 race riots in Handsworth and London.
31 October 2023
In his new work on five screens, "Becoming Wind", Akomfrah creates an allegorical representation of the Garden of Eden and its disappearance.
06 October 2017
Purple is a six-channel video installation addressing climate change, human communities and the wilderness.
01 January 2003
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.
28 April 2001
Drama about a man who lives in an analogue world but seeks to fulfil his desires in a digital world.
21 September 2018
Commemorateing the millions of African soldiers, labourers and carriers participated in the First World War on the African continent and on the Western Front in Europe.
10 October 2017
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.
09 September 2021
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.
12 November 1991
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.
09 May 2015
Vertigo Sea is a three-screen film installation that explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls 'the sublime seas'.
15 October 2013
Nada and Rabieh are a Palestinian couple living far from the possibility of a homeland. A meditation on time, memory, and the distance from a dream.
08 October 2012
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.
01 January 1983
Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 1 – Signs of Empire is the first of a two-part 35mm slide-tape text entitled Expeditions; part two is entitled Images of Nationality.
