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The Nine Muses: Special Encore Screening!
Back by popular demand, the Images Festival and the Royal present an encore screening Images' 25th Anniversary Opening Night Film, The Nine Muses by John Akomfrah. This elegiac exploration of
migration, exile and alienation by the revolutionary British/Ghanaian
filmmaker will screen for ONE NIGHT ONLY at The Royal (608 College Street) on Tuesday May 29, 2012, at 7:00 PM.
** Update May 29: Advance sales are now offline, but tickets WILL be available at the box office, which opens at 6:15pm.
Revolutionary filmmaker 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. Akomfrah replaces the conventional formal structures of documentary filmmaking with a poetic study of the overlooked elements in historical materials, and this approach 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 U.K., 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 Alaskan landscapes, dynamic 35mm 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.
Layering temporal, psychological and physical realities and simultaneously travelling forward in space and backward in time, Akomfrah deftly weaves film 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.”
“One of the bravest films I have seen!” - Ken Russell, The Times
“An immersive and inspirational experience!” – David Parkinson, Empire Magazine
“Highly engrossing cinepoem – dazzling beauty!” – Geoff Andrew, Time Out London
“A heady stream of sounds, images, and ideas!” – Jason Anderson, The Grid
“The Nine Muses is epic!” – Harry Cepka, Toronto Film Scene
Watch the trailer!
