John Akomfrah is a Ghanaian-born British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator. Through experiments with moving image, he touches upon themes of memory, identity, postcolonialism, temporality and the politics of aesthetics. Along with artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, he is a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998) and its offshoot film and television production company Smoking Dogs Films (1998–present), whose first production, Handsworth Songs, examines racism in 1980s Britain. The film chronicles the Handsworth Riots of 1985—three days of unrest that swept throughout Birmingham in response to the arrest of a Black man. Using archival material, photographs and new footage, Handsworth Songs spotlights aggressive policing targeting Black communities across Britain and the nation’s industrial decline under the Thatcher government.