Reviews

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  ★★★★★ review by Hassan Vawda on Letterboxd

  RIP STUART HALL, the man made sense of an identity, history and culture so complex like no other. Hall put something that every immigrant and product of immigration felt into words like water. PERSONALLY he has had as much of an impact on me as an artist and as a person than any filmmaker, painter, poet AND MOVIE has had

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  ★★★★ review by rebekah on Letterboxd

  Stuart Hall is like, my hero. In years of studying only academic writer who I have both understood and agreed with and also sort of feel like he's writing from inside my brain only more articulate and researched.
  
  I have been obsessed with John Akomfrah since I saw Vertigo Sea 2 or 3 years ago, and only found out about this because my lecturer on documentary module actually gave me a copy - his own but brand new and unopened - he had already seen it and knew I would love it more which is so so kind.

  Funny watching this having done shadowing at BBC archive - amazing to have made a doc. using solely archival material and also wonderful. Stuart Hall is the man RIP!!!!

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  ★★★★½ review by Hassan Vawda on Letterboxd

  Like many, when I first discovered Stuart Hall as a teenager – it was like a key to discovering and understanding my own identity, culture and not just where I stand in society. But why? He is a voice of all generations of people on the move, and in the last century where cultures have become increasingly blurred, societies have become increasingly intricate and diversity builds higher skyscrapers, it took a man of utmost knowledge, understanding and compassion of the world to keep up and give a dialogue to the patchwork and intertwined narratives of identity. It is a patchwork so complex, so vast of historical events and so fluid to grasp that it also took great film-making technique by directorJohn Akomfrah to compile and present Stuart Hall, his theories, his considerations and his own identity in to an exquisite piece of cinema.

  Full Review: mediumcloseup.co.uk/post/60837335093/the-stuart-hall-project-2013-dir-john-akomfrah

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  ★★★★★ review by Ash_Clark on Letterboxd

  Film of the year.

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  ★★★★½ review by Violet on Letterboxd

  Poised, elegant, and quietly moving with Miles Davis' trumpet evoking nostalgia and yearning, this documentary pays poetic respect to its subject Stuart Hall by weaving his personal narrative into the wider social and political events of his time. It is not just another documentary in which important figures praise on cue; instead, it lets Hall speak through his archived footages and restart the conversations we thought had finished. I spent an entire afternoon immersing myself in Hall's extraordinary voice and thinkings about race, culture, and identity, once again reminded of how he spoke to the migration of my sense of self during that first encounter in my lit class. Thank you John Akomfrah for your graceful tribute to my intellectual hero and sharing with him the same point of departure: constructing a space in which the emergence of new meanings is possible.

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