SYNOPSIS
Twenty years after his departure to the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus sets off an epic journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey - the narrative reference point for John Akomfrah’s unusual and genre defying story about chance, fate and redemption. Structured as an allegorical fable and loosely inspired by existential science fiction, The Nine Muses is a stylised, unusual and idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic. Divided into nine overlapping musical chapters and mixing a vast array of archival material, The Nine Muses is a modern recasting of Homer’s epic as a “song cycle” about journeys, migration, memory and the power of elegy.