Who Needs a Heart is a parable of political becoming and subjective transformation and remains BAFC’s most controversial film. Akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975, the film explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure; the counter-cultural anti-hero, activist and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik aka Michael X. Who Needs a Heart is a largely silent film whose soundtrack of Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane and the ritual music of the Llamas and Tibetan Monks of the Four Great Orders investigates the expressionist potential of music to create the conditions for the movement of images. As John Akomfrah stated, “we were convinced that sound itself had a gaze, a way of constructing a look, and I think Who Needs A Heart is probably the best way we’ve found so far of substantiating that thesis.”