Nadia Latif visited Lynette Yiadom‑Boakye's Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain multiple times around the pandemic and used the paintings as a creative touchstone. The paintings shaped Latif's visual approach to her debut feature, The Man in My Basement, influencing choices in colour, perspective, gaze, and point of view. Latif consulted a book of the paintings each morning on set and gifted the Tate exhibition catalogue to the cast before filming. Much of the film is set at night with a predominantly Black cast, and specific works such as The Stygian Silk informed ideas about inky darkness and an inner, un-sourced illumination.
"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."
"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."
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