20/03/2024 - Daniele Vicari delivers a wonderful documentary about video artist Michele Avantario’s encounter in the 1980s with Fela Kuti, and his dream of making a film about the iconic afrobeat pioneer

If there’s one character who’s perfectly suited to the description “larger than life”, it’s Fela Kuti, an iconic afrobeat pioneer with studios in London and a Nigerian hero, who had 27 wives, who clashed with the military junta of the time, who brought his music and his message fighting the exploitation of Africa to international audiences by way of tours which involved entourages of 50 people and albums of 20-minute songs, and who was arrested a number of times for counterfeit money and possession pf marijuana (43 kilos of which was found in his baggage in Milan in 1980), until his death caused by an Aids-related illness in 1997 at the age of 58. Fela left behind seven children, fifty or so albums and a musical legacy which his children Femi and Seun and his former drummer Tony Allen have worked hard to keep alive and which has a whole new generation of black musicians along the lines of Jay-Z (who co-produced the biographical musical Fela! in 2008) and Alicia Keys have subsequently dipped back into. London-based director Steve McQueen spent years working on a biopic of the artist before eventually abandoning the project. Now, Daniele Vicari, one of Italy’s most significant and meticulous directors of documentary and fiction films, is indirectly paying tribute to him by way of Fela, My Living God [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which is hitting Italian cinemas on 21 March via Luce Cinecittà, having previously featured in the latest Rome Film Fest.

It's an indirect tribute, because the protagonist of Vicari’s documentary is Michele Avantario, a young, jazz-loving filmmaker and video artist who met the revolutionary, controversial and unreachable Fela Kuti in the ‘80s, following him from concert to concert and then to Lagos, Africa, and from that point onwards dedicating his life to fulfilling his dream: to make a film starring the musician himself…. Without ever succeeding. This youngster coming from Nam June Paik’s early experiments with digital images, compared himself with “The Black President of Africa”, a living legend, "a tornado of a man who liked to play, eat, make love and get high. But he was also gentle, he loved humanity, he had principles”, as Rikki Stein, Fela’s manager for 15 years, explains. As pointed out by Vicari himself, Michele’s utopia is a utopia of film, music, politics and the desire to change oneself and the world.

The dual portrait depicted in Fela, My Living God was born out of Michele’s wife, Renata Di Leone, wanting to bring that unfulfilled dream to life using his one-of-a-kind, unprecedented archive, composed of photographs and 20 hours’ worth of videos. Michele’s diary gave rise to the screenplay written by Renata Di Leone, Greta Scicchitano and Daniele Vicari, and Michele himself is lent the voice of actor Claudio Santamaria, while Andrea Campajola’s wonderful editing is also the product of archive material from 47 different archival sources, spanning the turbulent ‘70s and ‘80s. Michele’s initiatory journey through his mentor Fela’s Yoruba animist rituals is buoyed by music from Teho Teardo’s original score.

Fela, My Living God is produced by Italian firms Fabrique Entertainment [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Luce Cinecittà and Rai Cinema, in co-production with Lokafilm (Slovenia) and Grasshopper Films (UK).

(Translated from Italian)