John Akofrah tries to combine documentary and personal essay, which sounds promising. He merges archive imagery with beautifully shot - though heavy post produced - wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrants coming into the UK from the 60s onwards. Sadly, what starts out as a promising experiment ends up being a self indulgent, problematic and almost arbitrary combination of found footage, literature and music, each of them of high quality but all of them together boring and hard to bare. Like a cook who thinks combining expensive ingredients automatically will result in a exquisite dish John Akomfrah is wrong. It makes a mess and in the end you are just sad about the useless waste of the high class ingredients.
Review of The Nine Muses
