[1] Sight & Sound magazine's Ashley Clark described it as "a strongly personal work" that "unfolds simultaneously as a tribute to a heroic figure, a study of the emergence of the New Left and its attendant political ideas, and a summation, in thematic and technical terms, of the key characteristics of Akomfrah’s body of work thus far (intertextuality, archival manipulation, a focus on postcolonial and diasporic discourse in Britain).

He comments that, similar to Miles Davis’s trumpet, it is the seemingly most mundane portions of everyday life that can affect the person we become and more broadly provide an accurate barometer of social change.

Hall says the theory that full assimilation is possible, or that the people who came over two generations would disappear into the host family and become more or less indistinguishable from them, was a dream or illusion to be buried on both sides.

It is in that moment that the archaic ideals of "perfect assimilation" in Britain die and the multi-cultural society comes to life: "we are not going to stay on the terms of becoming just like you.

Akomfrah uses the interplay to elucidate Hall's critical theorisation that everyday lived experiences (examples given included waiting in line at the labour department, on public buses, etc.)

This exchange between identity and creation of a multicultural social reality is evident in the video clip of Hall debating the white woman about refugees from Kosovo and whether the UK should serve as a new space for them.

This narrative is paired with ominous light piano music, and a beautiful wedding portrait of a late 19th-/early 20th-century black British couple.

The pairing of the lovely image and the contemporaneous racist dialogue shows the interaction between everyday lived experience and the construction of social phenomena.

Akomfrah explains: "The Miles Davis music provided you with a kind of marker of time, which is much more explicit I felt than The Unfinished Conversation.

He realized that the path he was forging for himself was not and could not be consistent with his family's because of his skin, and that Jamaica though integral to his process of learning and growing was very far from somewhere he could categorize as home.