Event

A conversation between acclaimed British filmmaker John Akomfrah and Scribe’s executive director Louis Massiah.

John Akomfrah is considered one of the founding figures of Black British cinema. His documentaries, feature films and gallery installations have won him prizes and critical acclaim across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. As a founder of the Black Audio Film Collective, the seminal British film-making collective, he co-produced a broad range of work for seventeen years - fiction films, tape slides, single screen gallery pieces, experimental videos, creative documentaries and music videos. Akomfrah’s debut as a director, the controversial and influential Handsworth Songs (1986), reworks documentary conventions to explore the history of the contemporary British black experience. Other landmark films that have shaped the documentary are Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Testament (1998).

Akomfrah will screen excerpts from his two new works Mnemosyne (2010), a tone poem that explores migration and The Genome Chronicles (2010), a meditation on the close deaths of artist Donald Rodney and Akomfrah's mother.

Presented in partnership with Scribe Video Center, Temple University’s Department of Film and Media Studies and the University of Pennsylvania’s Cinema Studies Program, Center for Africana Studies, and English Department - Latitudes Reading Group.