Crossings: The Nine Muses

Crossings: Stories of Migration is an ICA-led UK-wide film and events programme supported by the BFI using National Lottery funding and in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University

Weaving together Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, stunning winter vistas and a vast array of archival material, The Nine Muses is divided into nine overlapping musical chapters to create a philosophical rumination on the emigrant's experience, the journey and the idea of home. Devised and scripted from the writings of authors including Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Sophocles and Dylan Thomas, The Nine Muses is a cerebral and sensual journey – a meditation on displacement, identity and memory.

Structured as an allegorical fable, The Nine Muses is a stylised and idiosyncratic telling of the history of mass migration from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia to a post-war Britain. This film is a monument to a forgotten generation.

The Nine Muses, dir. John Akomfrah, UK 2011, 94 mins