Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela (2014) opens at New York’s IFC Center on August 1, 2014. First Official Trailer of “Finding Fela” Documentary is now available on youtube premiering the Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti’s revolutionary Afrobeat sound.
To anyone familiar with Nigeria politics, Afrobeat music and revolutionary post-colonial ideologies in Africa, Fela Anikulapo Kuti needs no introduction.
Hailed as a revolutionary by some and a rebel by others, Fela Kuti was a powerful and dangerous mixture of the two.
For many, his music was and still is arguably the most relevant and most poignant testimony of the corrupt state of Nigerian affairs since the oil-rich country became independent from Britain in 1960. His Afrobeat rhythms, black pride and African consciousness, mixed with his defiant attitude, as well as his charm and charisma, made Fela both a hero and a target. From the everyday person to the elite, Fela’s music struck a chord (and in some cases a nerve or two) with people all over Nigeria, and beyond.
In Finding Fela, filmmaker Alex Gibney explores Fela Kuti’s pioneering legacy painting a portrait of a man who has succeeded in achieving his self-fulfilled prophecy, highlighted through his self-appointed name ‘Anikulapo’, of living forever.
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