About

The Nine Muses is a meditation on the migrant experience, displacement, memory and the way landscape shapes culture and identity. Artist-filmmaker John Akomfrah weaves together archival footage of Caribbean and African migrants in Britain making their way to work, with startling images of frozen land and seascapes in contemporary Alaska. The bustle of the city workers is contrasted by quiet, wintry landscapes in which a mysterious hooded figure stands. Told across nine chapters marking the nine ancient Greek muses, Akomfrah overlays his landscapes with poetic voiceover quoting from Homer to Emily Dickinson to Rabindranath Tagore.