Movie Review
Finding Fela
Running time: 119 minutes. Not rated (violence, profanity, brief nudity, drug use). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.
The film-industrial complex otherwise known as Alex Gibney has returned. His latest documentary concerns the towering Nigerian composer and musician Fela Kuti, who died in 1997, as well as efforts to mount the recent Broadway musical, “Fela!”
Fela’s songs were fiercely political epics that often ran for more than 20 minutes; he fought injustice with a courage that at times bordered on lunacy. One horrifying reprisal saw Fela’s mother killed during a raid when Nigerian government soldiers threw her out a window.
Good interviews and fantastic archival footage are put together with proficient blandness. Narrative inconveniences — such as Fela’s 27 wives, and what became of them after the HIV-positive Fela continued to have unprotected conjugal sex — get short shrift. But though the filmmaking is not terribly exciting, Fela’s life and music are.
