‘Finding Fela’ Film Review
Directed by Alex Gibney
Reviewed by Karen Henry
Afrobeat could be heard thumping from Main Street during the opening weekend of Sundance Film Festival in Park City last weekend, energetically performed by theFela Kuti tribute band known as the Fela! Band. Typical of Afrobeat bands from the 70s and 80s, more than a dozen performers were on stage with the backup singers gyrating away. Even Fela Kuti’s daughter Kemi came out to perform a song. The tribute band’s singer Sahr Ngaujah had recreated Fela Kuti’s life and music in the Tony-winning Broadway play Fela!, a focal point of the documentary film Finding Fela that premiered at the festival this week.
Alex Gibney‘s sonically, historically, and visually stunning film presents a full image of the life and music of Fela Kuti. Fela, who created and popularized Afrobeat in the 1970s, was a controversial personality during his lifetime. He was hugely influential musically and politically in Nigeria, but largely unknown in the West for years.
Coming from a Protestant family with an activist mother and Reverend father, Fela studied music in London and performed with his early band in Los Angeles in 1969. He then developed his Afrobeat music, drawing influences from church chants, jazz, local High-life music, James Brown and the Black Power movement. Performing nightly at the Afrika Shrine in his hometown of Lago, Nigeria, he alternated between political commentary about post-colonial Nigeria, religious ceremonies, and developing his danceable new sound. His distinct sound incorporated Nigerian pidgen English and endless grooves flowing into songs from 10 to 30 minutes long.
His Afrobeat music was decades ahead of its time. As several people referenced in the film, Fela was as significant a folk musical hero in the 1970s as Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. However, the music of Dylan and Marley was more accessible, and at the time, Fela Kuti‘s music mostly appealed to urban sophisticates. Since then, his grooves can be heard as influences to Paul Simon, the Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend–and the list goes on.
Finding Fela director and producer, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, produced five powerful films in 2013 and 2014 alone: History of the Eagles Part One, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, The Armstrong Lie, Sunshine Superman, and of course, Finding Fela. His documentaries are masterfully created, and in Finding Fela, the music, interviews, historical footage, and editing are all seamlessly combined to create an impactful story. At two hours’ length, it seems long, but is always captivating. There is an abundance of new and significant information about Fela’s life revealed towards the end of the film, enough to keep you constantly engaged.
The film project began as the recording of the restaging of the Broadway play Fela! in Nigeria. As the movie’s director Gibney explains, “It became a film about who is Fela and why is he still important. It is about the soul of a man, how both he found himself and how the play creators found the essence of Fela — his humanity, his commitment to social change, and the fantastic music that is still so present and still relevant.” As Gibney was working on the project, more footage became available, and the film ended up becoming a seamless meld of the theatrical interpretation with incredible recordings from his private and public lives.
Fela Kuti‘s epic songs, filmed live performances, and recordings are his legacy. His life, however, was just as epic: political harassment, polygamy, drugs, imprisonment, and megalomaniac behavior. His funeral (he died in 1997 at age 58) was attended by a million people — creating chaos in the streets of Lagos, just as Fela would have liked it. The filmmakers discovered rare footage of the family dramatically anticipating the arrival of the crowds in a large stadium with an open casket. For hours, they watched only handfuls of people trickle in. Then the onslaught began. It was pretty amazing to watch.
Karen Henry is an Associate Editor at LA YOGA who volunteers in a variety of capacities for nonprofit organizations and artists around Los Angeles. She practices yoga as a counterbalance to her daily impact sports and is a mother of four grown children who also practice yoga . Now, she’s working on teaching yoga and joy of life to the grandkids!