A Cannes Directors’ Fortnight launch for her latest short Jitterbug in May has motivated artist and writer/director Ayo Akingbade.

“That’s the ultimate dream, to have your premiere in Cannes — all that attention was crazy,” she says. “People were saying, ‘You have to start working on your narrative.’” And so she is: a feature version of Jitterbug is her “number one goal”, with a script in early develop­ment.

Jitterbug chronicles a day in the life of an 18-year-old student who receives unexpected news. It marks a move into drama for Akingbade; most of her extensive shorts career has been a mix of pure and hybrid non-fiction work.

Recording her friends’ conversations on a flip phone as a teenager provided the Hackney, east London native with her first taste of filmmaking, and led to debut short Tower XYZ in 2016. “I wanted to talk about my environment in an abstract way, using strange humour,” she says.

She made that film while at the London College of Communication, graduating in 2017, with further work including Dear Babylon during her time at Royal Academy Schools, where she completed her MA last year.

Akingbade defines herself as “an artist who makes films”. She has recently returned from shooting two projects in Nigeria — one in Lagos, the other in Idanre Hill in the country’s southwest region. The former is a documentary commissioned by London’s Chisenhale Gallery and Bristol’s Spike Island, which will launch in November this year and tour arts spaces until 2024.

In the editing process is Keep Looking, a short filmed in New York in winter 2021, in which Akingbade plays herself, an artist searching for funding for her next film. Named after a song by Sade, the comic piece is “an homage to Chantal Akerman”, supported by Cinereach and the Arts Council.

Gentrification is a key theme in her work. “Identity and class are so fascinating,” Akingbade says. “Living in London, you can’t escape it.” She is, however, planning a move out of the city “to see if that changes how I work and live”.

“Someone like myself, I have to build my own thing — there’s no-one that’s come before me that I can model.”

Contact: Gabriel Blair, Casarotto Ramsay & Associates

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