Michael Kiwanuka returns to the creative setting of “FUDGE” through a short documentary released October 28, 2026. Directed by Jodie Canwell, “The Making of ‘FUDGE’: A Film” uses footage from 2023, when he experimented in a small studio near Southampton. Filmed before his later stroke, it captures the spontaneous beginnings of his fifth album rather than documenting his subsequent illness or a return to performing.
Michael Kiwanuka appears in a small studio near Southampton, spending time with friends and collaborators as they try out ideas whose final destination remains uncertain. It is spring 2023, and Jodie Canwell’s camera records without the pressure of a formal presentation. Those images now form the basis of a film about how “FUDGE” began to develop.
The documentary premiered on October 28, 2026, five days after the album’s release. Its filming date is important: Kiwanuka was developing this project while still working on “Small Changes”, which arrived in 2024. The footage therefore records a period when two albums coexisted in his thoughts before acquiring separate identities and release histories.
The starting idea came from doodles in the margins of a notebook. Michael Kiwanuka recalled drawing during his student years or while talking with other people, without necessarily expecting the marks to become a finished work. He wanted to carry that sense of unforced movement into music, allowing an idea to begin before deciding precisely what it should become.
The aim was not to avoid structure or careful production. Songs could be fully developed while retaining something of the ease that prompted them. He described a record resembling a more detailed version of those informal drawings, looking for a balance in which precision did not erase spontaneity or restrict an idea before it had room to grow.
The title “FUDGE” reflects a related preference for something playful, familiar and unpretentious. In the film, he uses a humorous comparison with caviar to distinguish an ordinary pleasure from an object carrying different social associations. The name expresses the wish to make accessible, lively work without adding a formality that might stand between the music and its initial enjoyment.
Canwell, a friend and photographer, followed Michael Kiwanuka and the other musicians through recordings and everyday studio time. Discussions, breaks and returns to instruments sit alongside explanations of his thinking. Rather than building only around promotional interviews, the film presents making music as something emerging through collaboration, personal contact and the small decisions surrounding the sessions.
She described the access as a privilege, emphasising the trust that allowed her to record the wider creative experience. That personal familiarity gave the camera opportunities different from a tightly scheduled interview. The interest extends beyond a completed song to the conversations, experiments and shared time from which its choices gradually emerged.
The album also involved a change in his production role. Earlier records had developed through close collaboration with Danger Mouse and Inflo, important contributors to his sound. This time, Michael Kiwanuka took a more active position behind the desk, using the smaller studio as a place to experiment independently before every decision had to fit a larger production framework.
Independence did not mean working entirely alone. Producer Dom Monks and string arranger Rosie Danvers became involved as the music developed, with work taking place in Southampton and Frome. Kiwanuka remained the principal creative figure, choosing collaborators able to support the freedom he had sought while helping the early recordings grow into a finished album.
The contrast with “Small Changes” concerned the point from which work began. That project developed with more planned attention to arrangement and detail; “FUDGE” left greater room for a melody or rhythm appearing without a predetermined purpose. Further refinement remained possible, but the first impulse did not need to justify itself before the musicians could follow it.
Michael Kiwanuka also drew encouragement from words by the late jazz musician Chick Corea, discovered during the pandemic. The idea involved recognising what an artist personally finds beautiful and trusting that judgement. It offered a reason to follow creative enjoyment without continually evaluating every impulse against an external standard or knowing its final destination from the outset.
“FUDGE” arrived on October 23, 2026, nearly a year later than originally planned. The material had been completed before the musician’s serious health problem, with the delay linked to the illness that followed. Its 12 songs include “Summer Clothes”, “California”, “Drowning in Your Heart”, “Across the Sky” and “Sing”, created during a different personal period from the one surrounding release.
He has spoken publicly about his later stroke and rehabilitation, while live appearances remain suspended. The film does not document that experience. Its interviews and footage come from 2023, so they should not be presented as current statements about recovery or evidence of a stage comeback. Nor does later knowledge automatically turn the earlier songs into commentary on an illness that had not yet occurred.
Before this record, Michael Kiwanuka’s catalogue had moved from “Home Again” in 2012 and “Love & Hate” in 2016 to 2019’s Mercury Prize-winning “Kiwanuka” and 2024’s “Small Changes”. The documentary now shows another form of renewal: a musician reconsidering how he works, with a notebook’s spontaneous lines providing an image for the pleasure of making something before its outcome is known.
