Created throughout lockdown, the most recent work from British-Ghanaian artist and film-maker Larry Achiampong is a poetic odyssey, a top-down journey by means of a near-future England, divided into chapters. It follows a younger girl (Perside Rodrigues), identified solely because the Wanderer, as she travels the nation, bearing witness to its iniquities and injustices. By way of a material of narrating voices, the movie touches on race, financial imbalance, the housing disaster and gentrification, amongst different themes.
The method is superficially much like the work of Andrew Kötting, though the playfulness and humour that characterises his travelogues is absent right here. There are moments of magic: the loamy folks vocals of artist Mataio Austin Dean, who sings twice within the movie, gave me goosebumps. And the movie conveys a pervasive sense of melancholy: a form of real-time bereavement for lives which are more and more marginalised within the identify of progress. However there are moments through which the image’s wafting lyricism works in opposition to it – factors that want, or deserve, to be extra emphatically made.
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