Koby Adom’s work on Dreaming Whilst Black is warm, funny and attentive to everyday worries, even when the programme slips into fantasy. We rate his ability to serve a shared vision, though a distinct personal style remains harder to judge.
Fi1m perspective
In Dreaming Whilst Black (2021), Kwabena can slip into fantasy, but work and money are still waiting when he comes back. The switches let us see how he thinks while breaking up the familiar routines of a workplace comedy. We warmed to him because the jokes never make his everyday troubles seem unimportant. Adom is one of four directors here, alongside Joelle Mae David, Sebastian Thiel and Jermain Julien. We would not credit him alone with its best decisions, but there is good comic judgement in the work he shares.
The earlier work was in shorts, including House Girl (2016) and Haircut (2018). Haircut led to his first television commissions, followed by directing work on Noughts + Crosses (2019) and two episodes of Top Boy (2022). The job changed from making shorts to contributing episodes within somebody else’s larger story. His work with Adjani Salmon suggests that he is comfortable with that responsibility, and willing to let the needs of a programme determine how he directs it.
Salmon is the important collaborator here, a writer-director with whom Adom has worked on multiple projects since 2015. In Dreaming Whilst Black, Adom’s stated aim was to serve Salmon’s vision rather than impose a signature. That seems the right choice for a comedy whose warmth depends on keeping Kwabena recognisable through the surreal interruptions: his frustrations still matter when the daydream stops. Some of its film-industry targets are familiar, and the directing cannot make every observation fresh. The cast and romance give us reasons to stay beyond the next joke.
His work beyond directing follows that co-operative approach. He founded DBK Studios in 2019 and uses it to support emerging Black filmmakers. Start with Dreaming Whilst Black for the humour and affection, with the caveat that its observations about the film industry will be less surprising than the ways it finds to interrupt a working day.
Biography
Koby Adom is a Ghanaian-British film and television director, writer and executive producer. He was born in Ivory Coast and raised in South London. He graduated with a master's degree from the London Film School in 2017.
Adom wrote and directed the short film Haircut (2018), which screened at the London Film Festival. He has directed episodes of the series Dreaming Whilst Black (2023) and Top Boy (2019), as well as multiple episodes of Noughts + Crosses (2020–2022). He is the founder and CEO of DBK Studios.
