Exclusive:
First Look Clip At
John Akomfrah's
Sundance-Bound
'The Stuart Hall Project'
by
January 14, 2013
British/Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah's Stuart Hall feature documentary will be making its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month, under the title The Stuart Hall Project.
Hall is a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the UK since 1951. He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1995-1997. His reume is certainly much more broader than that, and Akomfrah's documentary will fill in the blanks.
Here's how its described:
Antinuclear campaigner, New Left activist and founding father of Cultural Studies, this documentary interweaves 70 years of Stuart Hall’s film, radio and television appearances, and material from his private archive to document a memorable life and construct a portrait of Britain’s foremost radical intellectual.
And it should be fitting that the task has been undertaken by an influential black British artist, lecturer, writer, filmmaker and intellectual, who one could also described as radical in his own right - as well as a founder of the Black Audio Film Collective, with a 20-year-old body of work that is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world.
The Stuart Hall Project is on our must-see list at the Sundance Film Festival, and with Zeba Blay covering the festival for S&A this year (I'm staying put in NYC, taking the year off).
And in addition to Zeba's write-up on the film (there might be one from me as well), I'll be interviewing John Akomfrah in the next week or two.
S&A has been granted an exclusive first look at the film, which is embedded in the video player that follows immediately below: