Nadia Latif on the Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“I saw Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain just before and just after the pandemic. I think I went six times. There are forms of art that are really close to godliness. When I look at Lynette’s paintings, I feel like their spirits have come from somewhere, because it’s such a pure form of imagination. When I was making my film I would flip through a book of her paintings every single morning before I went to set. There are really interesting things to think about in them, in terms of perspective and gaze and POV. I also feel it taught me a lot about colour. Much of my film is set at night, with a predominantly black cast. When I think of her painting The Stygian Silk [2019], which is of a young black boy against a kind of inky-black background and surrounded by black dogs, all those things are totally clear. What’s beautiful about that work is that there’s a sort of light within the boy’s face. It’s not illuminated by anything and yet it is illuminated.”

The London-based Sudanese British theatre director Nadia Latif is renowned for her layered, virtuosic stage productions, including acclaimed collaborations with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview in 2019 and Marys Seacole in 2022). Latif’s rare sensibility is reflected in her forthcoming debut feature film, The Man in My Basement (in cinemas this autumn) – an adaptation of Walter Mosley’s eerie, unflinching novel of the same name about power, race and trauma – starring Corey Hawkins and Willem Dafoe. Having drawn inspiration from the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s richly imagined figurative vignettes, she gifted a copy of the artist’s Tate exhibition catalogue to everyone before filming.

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now.