Director: Andrew Cumming
Released in 2024 and produced between the United Kingdom and the United States, Out of Darkness is a documentary that sets out to trace a broad sweep of African history and the ways African cultures have reached societies around the world.
What is Out of Darkness about?
Presented as a feature-length work divided into three parts, the film gathers historical record, scholarship, and archival material to follow African peoples across many centuries. Rather than treating the continent as a single story, it moves between regions and eras, looking at trade, art, language, science, and migration. The three-part structure lets the film separate distinct themes while building toward a wider picture of how African societies developed and how their influence traveled outward. Its stated aim is to surface episodes of that history that are often left out of mainstream accounts, presenting them in sequence for a general audience.
Cast & crew
As a documentary, the film is carried less by on-screen performance than by narration, interviews, and the assembled visual record. Contributors and commentators guide the viewer through each segment, and the archival footage, maps, and location photography do much of the storytelling. Viewers looking for a dramatized retelling should note that this is a factual, non-fiction production rather than a scripted film.
Context & significance
The film belongs to the historical-documentary tradition, where the goal is to organize a large body of evidence into a clear, watchable sequence. Its subject, the long history of the African continent and its cultural contributions, is approached as a broad survey rather than a study of any single nation or period. Running across three parts and a substantial total length, it is built for viewers who want an overview they can watch in sections. For a diaspora audience, documentaries of this kind can serve as an accessible entry point into a region's history, offering context that ranges across geography, culture, and time without assuming prior background.
Where & how to watch
Out of Darkness is available to stream on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can follow the documentary in Farsi or in the original with Farsi text. Watching requires signing in with a K-Time account; reading this page does not. The K-Time interface is built in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora, making it straightforward to find and start the film.