Fela documentary receives Dutch premiere

Titled My Friend Fela, the documentary was directed by Brazilian filmmaker Joel Zito Araujo and is showing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Araujo’s film is the second major documentary on the late Afrobeat artist following Alex Gibney’s 2014 work Finding Fela, which placed production of the play Fela! at the centre of his film. Araujo’s documentary follows Fela's family and associates as they talk with writer and activist Carlos Moore.

“I loved him. He loved me,” says Moore in the trailer of the film, which includes soundbites from Afrobeat co-creator Tony Allen, Fela’s friend and lover Sandra Isidore and artist Lemi Ghariokwu, who designed some of the covers of Fela’s albums and recently designed the cover for Falz’s latest album Moral Instruction.

According to the synopsis provided by the festival, the new documentary “provides a new perspective on the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, in order to counter the most often portrayed narrative of Fela ‘as an eccentric African pop idol of the ghetto’." The complexity of Fela’s life is unravelled through the eyes and conversations of his close friend and official biographer, the Afro-Cuban Carlos Moore.

“As the documentary unfolds, it reveals the many influences and forces that shaped Fela’s extraordinary life: from the relationship he had with his mother to his many and problematic relationships with women, from his ties with his spiritual advisor Professor Hindu to his mutually influential encounters with African Americans. By placing Fela’s personal history in a pan-African context, the film becomes not only a portrait of one man but also of a pan-African generation.”

The film is being considered for a Lagos premiere later in the year.