what (not) to doc

Coming to PBS’s AfroPoP today, Monday, January 20:
MY FRIEND FELA

Director:
Joel Zito Araújo

World Premiere:
Rotterdam 2019

Select Festivals:
London, Encounters, Cork, Jihlava, Johannesburg, Mill Valley, It’s All True

About:
Nigerian music icon Fela Kuti’s pan-African significance is explored by his biographer and friend.

Seeking to look beyond the typical, exclusively music-focused look at Fela Kuti that has emerged in the years since his death, Cuban director Joel Zito Araújo, working with Carlos Moore, explores Kuti’s wide-ranging influences, locating them within a larger pan-African consciousness and revolutionary spirit that touches on such figures as Malcolm X, Maya Angelous, Sandra Izsadore, and Patrice Lumumba. With Moore as a guide, and Kuti as a soundtrack, the film chronicles the musician’s career, clashes with the government, struggles with paranoia, and eventual death from AIDS-related illness in 1997. It’s an ambitious take, but, unfortunately, also a somewhat cluttered one, with Kuti getting lost at various times, and controversial aspects of his life too often glossed over. The result is an intriguing portrait, but not a particularly satisfying or successful one.

Coming to DVD today, Friday, January 17:
BETTY: THEY SAY I’M DIFFERENT

Director:
Phil Cox

World Premiere:
IDFA 2017

Select Festivals:
Melbourne, Indielisboa, In-Edit, Revelation Perth, Festival Del Popoli, Indie Memphis

About:
On the pioneering but mysteriously short-lived career of 1970s funk queen Betty Davis.

For a brief time in the early 1970s, Betty Davis was the queen of funk. Though unfairly better known as Miles Davis’ wife, she released three albums and attracted notoriety for her raunchy lyrics and suggestive stage antics. By the end of the decade, however, she left the music industry and moved to Pittsburgh. Director Phil Cox explores Davis’ career, making an argument for her importance and influence on those that followed, and approaches her disappearance as a great mystery. Unfortunately, the film – clocking in at under an hour – doesn’t allot enough room to fully develop either of these threads, opting instead for teases of Davis’ presence and unnecessarily obtuse semi-experimental flourishes, leaving her to remain an intriguing but still elusive figure in the end.