The British art collective tackles the theme of racial protests and changes the face of documentary filmmaking forever. Russian premiere as part of the Collective Cinema Festival.
Tickets will be available later
Handsworth Songs
- Date:
- 28 Sep 2026,
19:30–21:45
Tickets will be available later
- Age restrictions
- 18+
1986, John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective
United Kingdom
61 minutes, English with Russian subtitles
Documentary
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What drives people to take to the streets and start rioting? In 1980s Britain, mired in economic depression and unemployment, protests flared up among diasporic communities outraged by police violence and discrimination. Addressing this complex and painful subject, the Black Audio Film Collective—a group of young Black artists and filmmakers—offers a paradoxical answer: there is no story in the riots themselves—only the ghosts of other stories.
Still from Handsworth Songs, 1986
Thirty-five years on, Handsworth Songs looks like a model of documentary filmmaking in the face of adversity. Akomfrah warns us that the rules of fly-on-the-wall reportage, or didactic journalism, no longer apply.
— Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books
John Akomfrah has unabashedly mixed techniques that should not have coexisted in a single film by any conventional standard. Street reports give way to the unsettling atmosphere of staged scenes, and archive footage shifts between motion and still frames. This blending of techniques creates ruptures in the fabric of the film—and these ruptures prove to be symbolically rich, illustrating the gaps in how 1980s Britain portrayed its Black citizens on screen.
