The Nine Muses: Exploring migration and memory

A film which explores themes of migration, memory and identity hit the cinemas last week.

The Nine Muses, released last Friday (20), interweaves archive footage of Black and Asian migrants in 1950s Britain with abstract sequences of a figure wandering through a snowy landscape to raise questions about journey, homelands and identity.

Director John Akomfrah said his experimental film was inspired by the Greek Myth of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, who gave birth to the nine Muses.

Akomfrah said he wanted to find a new way of using archive material as art rather than documentary.

“I am obsessed with archival material. Those ghostly traces of lived moments, those pariah images and sounds that now occupy a unique space somewhere between history and myth. How does one begin to say something new about a story everyone claims to know? What considerations should govern how one constructs a “historical fiction” about events and lives that have been profoundly shaped by what the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott called, “the absence of ruins”? Lives without monuments, without the ‘official’ signature of recognition and interest."

Akomrah, who is a Laureate of the prestigious European Cultural Foundation, 2011, added,

"This film is my attempt to suggest what some of those “ruins” might look like, a desire to look into that dark mirror of one’s own past in search of images, ideas, writers and music with which to construct such a monument."

The film is showing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH until 2nd February. There is also an opportunity to organise group screenings of the documentary at discount prices for groups who work with elderly people from Africa, Caribbean and Asia.

For more information, contact Marlon Palmer on palmer.marlon@gmail.com