Films byTexts by Black Audio Film Collective
FILM
John Akomfrah, 1991, 79’

Who Needs a Heart explores the tumultuous life of civil rights activist Michael X trough a fictionalized group of friends and lovers.

Conversation EN
17.09.2014

“And that is the problem that most of the discourse runs into. In other words, as long as you keep insisting that the reasons why people make certain social acts are purposive, rational and programmatic, you’re gonna miss the point, which is that we’re not entirely rational in our actions. [...] I tried – like everybody else I was looking and asking around – but when we put it together, we realised it just wasn’t enough. It didn’t seem to explain the cataclysm. So you needed other ways of trying to do that and we did. We were editing this for a year trying to take seriously the folkloric and the ethnographic and it just wasn’t there. There was always a gap between the fire and the voice.”