What Sampha: Process is about
Sampha: Process is a 37-minute short film that functions less like a conventional music documentary and more like a memory — fragmented, tender, and slightly out of reach. Built around the world of Sampha's debut album of the same name, the film moves between Morden in South London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, tracing the emotional and geographic roots that shaped one of British music's most quietly extraordinary voices. Don't expect a standard artist profile with talking-head interviews and tour footage. What Kahlil Joseph has made here is closer to a waking dream — staged scenes bleeding into street footage, dance sequences dissolving into family moments, all of it held together by Sampha's music and a pervasive sense of inherited grief.
How Sampha: Process came together — production and creative origins
The film was produced by Pulse Films in partnership with Young Turks and Apple Music, which hosted the exclusive premiere in early 2017 — timed deliberately to coincide with the release of Sampha's debut album Process. The director, Kahlil Joseph, was already known for his visually dense work with musicians; he had contributed to Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album, and that pedigree is evident in every frame of this project. As Paste Magazine reported, Joseph brought the same layered, format-mixing approach to Sampha's story, shooting across 16mm, 35mm, digital, and drone footage to create something that feels less like a film and more like a family album come to life.
The cast and contributors include Hawa S. Bangura and the Sisay family, whose presence grounds the more abstract sequences in something recognizably human. There's no single narrative thread to follow — instead, the film accumulates meaning through juxtaposition: a child running through a London estate, a ritual in Sierra Leone, a performance that's hard to categorize as either staged or spontaneous. Hard to say if that ambiguity was always the plan, but it works in the film's favor.
On the awards front, Sampha: Process hasn't accumulated major festival prizes in the way a feature documentary might, but it has earned sustained critical attention and revival screenings — most notably at ACMI in Melbourne, where it was paired with Joseph's Fly Paper as part of a dedicated program. The film holds a 6.9/10 user rating on IMDb, which is modest in scale but consistent in sentiment. No MPAA rating applies to a project of this nature, and mainstream aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes don't carry a formal score — but the critical conversation around it has been quietly persistent for nearly a decade.
Why Sampha: Process still holds up as a piece of filmmaking
What's striking is how Joseph refuses to let the film become a simple tribute. The imagery isn't illustrating Sampha's lyrics so much as running alongside them — sometimes in sync, sometimes in deliberate tension. It's Nice That noted that Joseph's approach creates a cinematic portrait rather than a promotional vehicle, and that distinction matters enormously here. This isn't content. It's a film.
The emotional core — grief, specifically the grief of losing a parent and the grief of displacement, of being from two places at once — never gets stated outright. It accumulates. A scene where Sampha sits at a piano in what appears to be a domestic setting carries more weight than any interview could, partly because you can feel the silence around the music. The multi-format shooting style isn't just an aesthetic choice; the grain of 16mm and the flatness of digital footage create different textures of memory, as though some moments are more worn than others from being revisited so many times.
The contributors, particularly Hawa S. Bangura, bring a physicality to the film that keeps it from becoming purely introspective. Dance, in Joseph's hands, becomes a form of testimony. We're not watching performance for its own sake — we're watching bodies carry histories that words can't quite hold. I keep coming back to a sequence in Freetown where movement and landscape merge in a way that feels genuinely unrepeatable.
Movie OTT covers a wide range of music films and documentaries like this one, where the line between concert film and art cinema gets productively blurred — it's a category that's grown significantly on streaming platforms over the past few years.
Where to stream Sampha: Process online
Sampha: Process is available on major OTT services, and the easiest way to check current availability in your region is to use the Where-to-Watch widget at the top of this page, which Movie OTT updates regularly as licensing windows shift. Given the film's origins as an Apple Music exclusive, Apple TV+ is a natural first place to look — the platform has maintained a strong catalog of music-adjacent short films and documentaries that don't always get surfaced through standard browsing. Streaming rights for short films can be notoriously unstable, moving between platforms without much fanfare, so checking directly through Movie OTT's aggregator tools saves the guesswork. The film runs only 37 minutes, which makes it an easy watch to fit around anything else you've got queued up.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Who directed Sampha: Process?
Sampha: Process was directed by Kahlil Joseph, a filmmaker known for his visually layered work in music film, including contributions to Beyoncé's Lemonade. His approach blends documentary footage with staged and abstract sequences across multiple film formats.
Q: When was Sampha: Process released?
The film was originally released in early 2017, exclusively through Apple Music, to coincide with the launch of Sampha's debut album Process. Recent listings for the film relate to revival screenings rather than any new release.
Q: How long is Sampha: Process?
Sampha: Process runs approximately 37 minutes, making it a short film rather than a feature-length documentary. Its brevity is part of its design — it doesn't overstay its welcome or explain itself more than necessary.
Q: Where can I watch Sampha: Process?
The film is available on major OTT services; check the Where-to-Watch widget on this Movie OTT page for the most current regional availability. Given its origins as an Apple Music exclusive, Apple TV+ is often the most reliable place to find it.
Q: Is Sampha: Process based on a true story?
Yes — the film is a documentary-style portrait of the real Sampha Sisay, a British-Sierra Leonean singer-songwriter, and draws directly from his biography, including his upbringing in Morden, South London, and his family's connections to Freetown, Sierra Leone. The themes of grief and heritage reflect real events in Sampha's life.
Final thoughts on Sampha: Process — and who should seek it out
Sampha: Process isn't a film that announces itself. It arrives quietly and leaves the same way, but the images stay. For anyone who connected with Sampha's album — or who simply wants to see what a music film looks like when it's made with genuine artistic ambition rather than marketing intent — this is essential viewing. Thirty-seven minutes. That's all it asks. Movie OTT's editorial team would place it alongside the best short music films of the past decade, and if you're building a watchlist of artist portraits that actually respect the audience's intelligence, start here.
