Ayo Akingbade
Locarno Residency 2023 | United Kingdom
Locarno Residency 2023 | United Kingdom
2022 Screen Daily Star of Tomorrow, Ayo Akingbade is an artist, writer and director. She trained at the London College of Communication and Royal Academy Schools. Ayo’s short form documentary work has been spotlighted on MUBI & The Criterion Channel. Jitterbug, which explores displacement in increasingly gentrified Hackney, represents Ayo’s transition into narrative storytelling, and was selected as part of Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival 2022. Ayo likes to explore character and the nuances of human interaction and subject matters rooted in the social and political structures that dominate today’s society. She currently resides in London, England.
2015 In Ur Eye
2016 Tower XYZ
2018 A is for Artist
2018 Street 66
2019 Claudette’s Star
2019 Dear Babylon
2019 So They Say
2020 Deadphant
2020 Hella Trees
2021 Fire in My Belly
2021 Red Soleil
2021 Sukiyaki
2022 55 Days
2022 Jitterbug
2022 The Fist
2022 Faluyi
Set in Northeast London, a working-class British Nigerian teenager, AFENI is bound for Cambridge University to study History of Art. But when the local authority unceremoniously notifies them that their home has been sold to a property developer and that they have to relocate to the countryside. Afeni begins to question her choices and leaving her loved ones behind.
At its heart, Jitterbug is a love letter to my birthplace, an attempt to reckon with the rapidly changing face of the city, as the policies of the government, a hostile environment towards lower-classes, too long a legacy of inequality and hyper-gentrification continue to drive up staggering wealth disparity and poverty. As a filmmaker, my response is to reckon with my agency as an artist, while paying close attention to the memories, histories and lived experiences of those around me that threaten to be effaced. Jitterbug is about ordinary people navigating the matrices of power, whilst underlining a young girl’s pursuit to find out about herself. The film is a culmination of my desire to create something that I haven’t seen before.
