Images is thrilled to announce our Opening Night at the 25th anniversary edition of the festival features the Canadian premiere of John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses, a contemporary epic about migration which uses Homer's Odyssey as the primary narrative. Born in Ghana, Akomfrah has long considered one of the most influential figures of black British culture in the 1980's. The Nine...
[read more] Images is thrilled to announce our Opening Night at the 25th anniversary edition of the festival features the Canadian premiere of John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses, a contemporary epic about migration which uses Homer's Odyssey as the primary narrative. Born in Ghana, Akomfrah has long considered one of the most influential figures of black British culture in the 1980's. The Nine Muses first premiered at the esteemed Venice Film Festival and also screened at the Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontiers program. Join us Thursday April 12 when Mr. Akomfrah will be in attendance for the opening night gala, post screening conversation with Cameron Bailey, 6:45 PM at the Royal (608 College Street).
Opening Night Gala:
The Nine Muses by John Akomfrah
Thursday 12 Apr 2012 6:45 - 9 PM
@ The Royal (608 College St.)
$15 general / $8 member, senior & student
Revolutionary filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah was a co-founder of the influential Black Audio Film Collective in the early 1980s and has since been responsible for creating and producing a remarkable oeuvre of challenging and diverse moving image work. Replacing the conventional formal structures of documentary filmmaking with a poetic study of the overlooked elements in historical materials lends his work a unique and timeless quality.
In The Nine Muses, the Ghanaian-born British artist uses Homer’s Odyssey as a point of departure for his elegiac exploration of migration, exile, alienation and the definition of home. Built around images of Caribbean and African migrants in the 1950s and 60s, the film looks in part at the experience of those referred to as “The Windrush Generation.” Combining static shoots of lone figures in empty frozen landscapes, dynamic 16mm archival footage and a layered sound collage of readings and music, Akomfrah’s evocative allegory of immigration is as much a journey in itself as a document of journeys.
The almost lunar Arctic landscapes depicted in the piece stand as points of departure from which to layer a variety of temporal, psychological and physical realities. Simultaneously travelling forward in space and backward in time, Akomfrah deftly weaves archival fragments with readings from Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, TS Elliot, Li Po, Rabindranth Tagore and the music of Arvo Pärt and India’s Gundecha Brothers in his self described “Proustian attempt to suggest the idea of migration.”
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