Artist Steve McQueen’s feature-film directing debut, Hunger, was very well received when it came out a couple of years ago. The gruelling movie about IRA hunger strikers Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender), even won the director a BAFTA for most promising newcomer.
Now he’s announced his follow-up project, with Variety reporting that McQueen has a film called Fela in the works, which he’s making through Universal subsidiary, Focus Features. The movie will be a biopic of African musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who was incredibly popular in the 70s and 80s, with Focus president James Schamus saying that “Fela might be the most globally influential pop artist outside the Beatles in the last 50 years.”
However it wasn’t just music where he left his mark as he was alaso very vocal about the opression he saw around him in Nigeria in the 1970s, which resulted in attacks on him and those around him by the government, which included his mother being killed when she was thrown out of a second storey window. He responded by placing her coffin on the steps of the Nigerian leader’s residence. He also formed his own political party and tried to run for president, but his candidacy was refused. When he died in 1997, over a million people attended his funeral.
While a Broadway musical about the singer/activist has recently opened, this will be completely separate to that and will instead be based on screen rights Focus have to Fela’s life and music, as well as Michael Veal’s book, ‘Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon’. It’s definitely a film the people behind it must truly believe is, as that rights package took five years to put together. McQueen will also write the film, alongside Biyi Bandele, although there’s no news yet on when it might go before the cameras.