Fela, il mio Dio vivente

Daniele Vicari / Italy / 2023 / 90’/ Italian

Early 1980s. A young filmmaker, Michele Avantario, meets the great Nigerian musician and revolutionary Fela Kuti and from that moment on devotes his life to making a film starring Fela himself. He will never succeed, but he will discover something more important to him: a new idea of existence. A film about utopia in film, music, politics, and the desire to change oneself and the world.

Screenplay Renata Di Leone, Greta Scicchitano, Daniele Vicari
Editing Andrea Campajola
Photography Gherardo Gossi
Original music Teho Teardo
Sound Editing Marco Saitta
Production Fabrique Entertainment and Luce Cinecittà with Rai Cinema
Producers Renata Di Leone, Giovanni Capalbo, Federico Poillucci, Clare Spencer

Daniele Vicari
Daniele Vicari is an Italian filmmaker and writer. Graduated in Story and Critic of Cinema with an essay focused on the S.M. Éjzenštejn’s theory. He collaborated extensively with the film magazine “Cinema Nuovo,” edited by Guido Aristarco, and with the magazine “Cinema 60” edited by Mino Argentieri. He has taught film in schools of all levels for about fifteen years, an experience codified in a four-handed volume with Antonio Medici: The Alphabet of the Gaze. Understanding Audiovisual Language, Carocci, which was edited in 2004 and won the “Filmcritica -Umberto Barbaro” award as the best essay on cinema. He made his film debut with two short films: Il nuovo (1991) and Mari del sud (1996). In 1998 he won the Sacher Prize with a documentary entitled Uomini e Lupi (Men and Wolves), and in the same year he collaborated with Guido Chiesa, Davide Ferrario, Antonio Leotti and Marco Puccioni on the documentary Partisans, stories of resistance in the province of Reggio Emilia. The following year he signed with Davide Ferrario Comunisti, a documentary on the Comandante Diavolo-Don Pessina affair. With Alfredo Falvo he made his first feature-length documentary film with film distribution together with Guido Chiesa Non mi basta mai(1999), winning the Cipputi prize at the Turin festival. With the first fiction feature film, Velocità massima (2002) in competition at the Venice Film Festival, he won countless awards including the Pasinetti Prize, Best Director at the Seville Film Festival, Grand Prix at Annecy, and the David di Donatello as best first feature; with his second fiction feature, L’orizzonte degli eventi, 2005, he competes the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes; Il mio paese(2006), a feature-length documentary, again wins the Pasinetti prize in Venice and a second David di Donatello for direction. Il passato è una terra straniera (2008), from the novel by Gianrico Carofiglio, wins the Miami International F. F. as best film and best leading actor to Michele Riondino. In 2012 he presented at the Berlin Film Festival Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood, a film that recounts the dramatic events of 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa, winning the Audience Award, 13 nominations for the David di Donatello which resulted in four awards, then received three Nastri d’Argento as well as awards given at various international festivals, the film is distributed worldwide by Universal International. At the same time he made La nave dolce(2012) official selection at the Venice Film Festival, with which he won a third Pasinetti prize; at Annecy in 2012 he received the Sergio Leone award as director of the year. With Sole Cuore Amore (2016), receives the Giuseppe De Santis award and a silver ribbon. With the tv film Prima che la notte (2018) he tells the story of Giuseppe Fava, winning a second silver ribbon. In 2019/20 he coordinates and directs the TV series Alligator, based on the works of the same name by Massimo Carlotto. During the 2020 lockdown, he made Il Giorno e la Notte, a smart-filming film by co-founding the production company Kon-Tiki with Andrea Porporati and Francesca Zanza He won the Ravesi Priza dalla pagina allo schermo and the Megamark prize for his book Emanuele Nella Battaglia, Einaudi, 2019. In 2022 he published Il cinema, l’Immortale, essay on cinema, published by Einaudi and made the fiction feature film Orlando, which was presented at the Turin Film Festival. He’s one of the founders of the School of Cinematographic Art Gian Maria Volonté, of which he’s artistic director.