Filmmaker John Akomfrah received Princess Margriet Award

Filmmaker John Akomfrah (right) and curator Charles Esche (left)

We must be radical and innovative if we are to build Europe anew. That was the clear message emanating from the fourth Princess Margriet Award (PMA) dedicated to artists and thinkers who make change possible. The new PMA laureates, filmmaker John Akomfrah and curator Charles Esche, received their awards in the Brussels cultural venue, The Egg, on March 19th, 2012.

John Akomfrah was chosen for his ground-breaking film oeuvre woven from perspectives often hidden from the mainstream narratives of European history. Film-maker and Cultural Activist John Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana and lives and works in London.



The jury lauded the development of Akomfrah’s oeuvre from his earliest film the ground-breaking Handsworth Songs (1986) to his latest film, Nine Muses (2010), an artistic meditation on migration, myth and memory which creatively weaves together layers of original footage, archival clips, sound and poetry.

In its entirety, Akomfrah’s longstanding body of work is a profound and multi-layered creation championing voices often hidden from the mainstream discourse of European pasts.

In 1982 Akomfrah was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, the seminal British film-making collective and produced a broad range of work — fictional films, tape slide installations, gallery installations, experimental videos and creative documentaries. Since 1998, Akomfrah is Director of the film and television production companies, Smoking Dogs Films, (London) and Creation Rebel Films (Accra).

Read more at European Cultural Foundation