“The living transform the dead into partners in struggle.”

Not so much a film-essay as a kind of film-litany comprising a set of implied yet infinite demands, John Akomfrah’s debut film — screening tonight at the HFA, with the director on hand for a Q&A afterward — is also a defining work of the UK’s Black Audio Film Collective, which went on to make a series of films, several also showing at the HFA this week, extending its aesthetic into new areas.

Unmistakably evincing a Marker-esque obliqueness in its depiction of the circumstances surrounding a series of 1985 riots in the working-class, largely immigrant-inhabited Birmingham neighborhood of Handsworth. This made-for-TV detournement of televisual documents possesses an obsessive, iterative power that derives about as much from Trevor Mathison’s extraordinary soundtrack — uncannily akin to the spectral stutter of Zoviet France (and also just plain uncanny) — as it does from its palpable outrage in the face of police harassment and the genteel racism that discreetly sanctions it.

“In time, we will demand the impossible,” promises a voiceover at one point, as grainy images of riot-police moving towards protesters process in slow motion across the screen. We have nothing else in which to do it, and nothing else to do.

3/9 – 7PM
61 minutes
Showing with PERIPETEIA (2012), 18 minutes
$12 Special Event Tickets

Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA
02138