Stuart Hall (1932-) is widely regarded as one of the leading lights of the British New Left movement, as well as helping to establish the discipline of cultural studies. Through a montage of television and radio appearances, intercut with news footage, director John Akomfrah offers a convincing account of Hall's life. The film is particularly strong when it focuses on Hall's origins in Jamaica, his polyglot background, and his first experiences of living and studying in England. The experience helped him understand the complexities of identity; there was no single construction of "Britishness" or "blackness" that he could use as a yardstick to define himself. Rather he came to realize that identities differ from person to person, and context to context. Akomfrah's film also chronicles Hall's involvement with the New Left Movement; his contribution to the New Left Review, his involvement in the Aldermaston marches of 1958, and his work on behalf of CND. While Hall's major mentors were E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, he understood that he could never really identify with them, on account of his different socio-cultural background. What is missing from the film, however, is an explanation of what "cultural studies" actually is, how it differs from other disciplines, and what Hall's contribution was to the development of the discipline. We understand something of its preoccupations with race, class and (latterly) gender, but we do not really find out anything about its interdisciplinarity; how it draws on insights from sociology, anthropology and literature, and tries to synthesize them into a perpetually shifting whole. The film's historical sense also tends towards the sketchy; some of the visual images Akomfrah uses (e.g. the footage from the Chile revolutions of the Seventies) appear to have little relevance to Hall's theoretical and/or cultural concerns. Nonetheless THE STUART HALL PROJECT is an intensely valuable text, providing a record of Hall's work over the last half- century.