Steve McQueen (no, not that one) turned from art to directing with the widely acclaimed Hunger, and he's sticking with cinema for his next effort, Fela, the story of Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
A hugely influential artist, Fela invented a style of music he called afrobeat, a mixture of jazz, funk and west African drumming, and became one of the best known artists on the continent. He was married to up to 27 women at a time (although he got it down to a rotating line-up of 12 and finally divorced even them, saying that "marriage brings jealousy and selfishness".
He was also politically active, writing a song comparing the government and its soldiers to zombies that caused the government to raid the commune where he lived and viciously beat him. They also threw his feminist activist mother out a second story window, causing her fatal injuries. Fela responded by setting her coffin on the steps of General Olusegun Obasani's residence. Fela died of AIDS-related illness in 1997.
The artist's life has recently become the subject of a Broadway musical, but this film is not related to that production, instead based on the biography Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon by Michael Veal and music rights to some of Fela's back catalogue. McQueen is set to co-write the adaptation with Nigerian-born, British-based playwright Biyi Bandele. James Schamus of Focus Pictures is producing the lot, and all in all we're expecting something at least as riveting as, and probably larger in scale than, Hunger.