Music Is The Weapon: The Life of Feli Kuti

Based on “Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon” by Michael Veal

Development: Focus Features

Fela Kuti — the king of Afro-beat, a human activist, sexual revolutionary, and political maverick. One of the most controversial pop musicians of the 20th century, this is a story about Fela’s relationship with Nigeria’s rapidly changing and often corrupt country. Fela’s legacy as a charismatic visionary continues to inspire contemporary hip-hop artists, and generations of artists who believe in music as a weapon.

Born into an affluent Nigerian family to an authoritarian Reverend father and radical, activist mother, Fela Kuti is a rascal, lover and natural musician with a rebellious streak a mile wide. Opting out of medical school in London, Fela chooses music — the only thing he could do. The London scene exposes him to Jazz, a sharp contrast to the Christian and Yoruba hymns of his youth.

A return to Lagos with a wife and children leaves him restless. Fela goes to America in search of success, opportunity, life. The road is a hard one, and his highlife band Koola Lobitos does not catch fire in the U.S. But influences both cultural and political — The Black Panthers, James Brown, Malcolm X, rock-and-roll — color his understanding. Fela is unprepared for the political awakening that accompanies his musical growth. Afrobeat is born.

Fela takes his political and sexual mix of Jazz, soul, funk and traditional African music back home and becomes the voice of his people — in opposition to the corrupt Nigerian government. Fela becomes Pulbic Meance No. 1. He is beaten, tortured, arrested, but the music cannot be stopped. Even after a brutal assault on his compound, the Kalakuta Reublic, Fela refuses to bow down to any power higher than truth. He renames himself Fela Anikulapo Kuti: he who holds death in his pouch, and marries 27 of his background dancers — his Queens.

Fela's legacy as a charismatic visionary, is one that synthesized a unique musical language while also clearing a space for popular political dissent and a type of counter cultural expression rarely expressed through such artistic genius.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Based on the novel by Mohsin Hamid
Director: Mira Nair

A Princeton graduate from Pakistan, Changez, succeeds on Wall Street, thriving in his adopted city. A thriller unfolds as the political events of the millennium test his allegiances and Changez is forced to choose — a country, a way of life, where he belongs. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is a collision of the personal and the political — when there is nothing left to lose, which side are you on?

Two men share a meal in Lahore, a Pakistani and an American, adversaries on either side of a debate, a cat-and-mouse game or perhaps something more sinister. Conversation turns to the life of the Pakistani, Changez.
Changez comes to the U.S. from Pakistan to attend Princeton. At the top of his class, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. Changez’ keen awareness of the differences between him and his acquaintances is thrown into sharp focus as the world around him begins to collapse. His own identity, viewed through the global perspective his work has provided, is in seismic shift as well. His powerlessness in Erica’s disappearance belies his relationship with his adopted home, friends and colleagues.

Changez returns to Lahore, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. His involvement with pro-Pakistan demonstrations — viewed as un-American by the international media — are called into question as is his connection to a possibly extremist student. After another attack, Changez’s link to the student implicates him indirectly to the group responsible.

What is the nature of Changez’ relationship to the student? Which side is he on? And, who is his dinner companion in Lahore?

"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is a riveting, brilliantly unsettling exploration of the personal and the political, the rational and the emotional. A thriller set against the backdrop of contemporary strife, The Reluctant Fundamentalist asks questions where answers fail to tell the whole story.

A Gesture Life

Based on the novel by Chang-rae Lee
Screenwriter/Director: Dennis Lee

Franklin “Doc” Hata, is a Japanese man of Korean birth who is an upstanding citizen in an all-American upstate New York community. But he has buried the scars of his involvement with the Korean “comfort women” during the war, and he now realizes his life has added up to no more than a “gesture”. As Doc finds love with a compassionate neighbor, and attempts to reunite with his estranged daughter, he must come to terms with all of the horrors he has endured or be ruined once and for all.

Franklin “Doc” Hata is a Japanese 70-year-old man of Korean birth who has lived for decades in the affluent town of Bedley Run. From the outside, his life is the immigrant's ideal American Dream but when a minor home fire incident sends him to the hospital, memory weaves a deeper path.

Doc is haunted by sins from the past — mistakes made in the upbringing of adopted daughter Sunny, the horrors witnessed during his time as a medic in the Japanese army, and a relationship with a widow that slipped away. Above all, a doomed love affair with the mysterious “K,” a Korean comfort woman he hoped to save from her fate. Doc’s life begins to unravel as he tries to reconnect with Sunny and her young son, Tommy. He is a man who has lived according to appearances for his entire life, afraid to reveal the darkness within, submerged beneah his own guilt.

"A Gesture Life" is an engaging study of a man who exists between lives — Korean, Japanese, father, companion, doctor, American — and under the long shadow war casts upon the soul.

The Sisterhood of the Night

Based on the short story by Steven Millhauser
Screenwriter: Marilyn Fu
Director: Caryn Waechter

A small New Jersey town is plunged into controversy when a teenage girl exposes a secret society of girls. Members of The Sisterhood hold their vow of silence, even as the community begins to believe the worst. Why are these girls willing to risk so much just for a nighttime gathering in the woods? The Sisterhood of Night chronicles three girls' unique and provocative alternative to the loneliness of adolescence and the digital abyss — unprecedented in an Internet age that is here to stay, and timeless in its resounding echoes of betrayal and friendship.

A small New Jersey town is plunged into controversy when a teenage girl exposes a secret society of high school girls. The suburban town of Fairview, New Jersey is as ordinary as can be, inhabited by church-going all-American families whose idea of a scandal is an ill-trimmed lawn. But even the most immaculate of towns has its share of secrets, and in Fairview, it involves a group of girls who go “off the grid” of internet social networking and sneak out after sunset to meet in a forest on the edge of town. One morning at church, Emily Parris, the school’s needy gossip girl, exposes a secret society of girls called “The Sisterhood of Night,” accusing them of deviant activities unimaginable to those living behind white picket fences.

The allegations throw Fairview into the public eye and blogosphere. The mystery only deepens when each of the accused refuses to explain herself and an on-line investigation yields…nothing. Frenzied and perturbed, the Parent-Teacher Association asks Gordy Milliken, the well-meaning guidance counselor to interview each of the girls to get to the bottom of the matter. Three of the girls are particularly suspicious: Mary Warren, the alleged leader of The Sisterhood who is covertly hooking up with a boy from school; Catherine Huang, who has a crush on David Beckham and hides her fear of losing her mom to cancer; and Lavinia Hall, a child prodigy pianist who doubts she’ll ever get kissed.

Though pressure mounts and the investigation turns invasive, Mary, Catherine, Lavinia and the other members of The Sisterhood hold their vow of silence, even as their classmates begin to assume things of them that may not be true. Why are these girls willing to risk so much, just for a nighttime gathering in the woods? What, then, are the girls’ deepest secrets? "The Sisterhood of Night" chronicles three girls’ unique and provocative alternative to the loneliness of adolescence and the digital abyss, along the way revealing the tragedy and humor of growing up — unprecedented in an internet age that is here to stay, and timeless in its resounding echoes of betrayal and friendship.

The Probable Future

Based on the novel by Alice Hoffman
Screenwriter: Sally Robinson
Director: Katja von Garnier

For thirteen generations, women of the Sparrow clan awaken to special powers on their 13th birthday. When Stella Sparrow turns 13, her gift is revealed — she now has the ability to see how people will die. One of her premonitions lands her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. A thriller ensues as Stella is stalked and sent away from Boston to live with the grandmother she never knew. Here Stella discovers the truth of her family history. Three generations of estranged Sparrow women must come together to survive the real killer as they navigate their own relationships and new connections.

"The Probable Future" tells the story of a family of New England women with a mysterious legacy — for thirteen generations, on their 13th birthday, an extraordinary gift is revealed to each girl that is uniquely her own.   Jenny Sparrow is able to see people’s dreams, while her aging mother Elinor is able to discern a lie.  But Jenny rejects the prophecies and fantasy of her heritage. She leaves Elinor and tries to create what she hopes is a normal life for her daughter Stella.

It is Stella’s 13th birthday. When her gift comes, it is unusual, terrifying and unwanted. Stella has the ability to see when and how people die. When Stella has a vision about a death and asks her father to help prevent it, a terrible chain of events unfolds, entangling the family in a murder mystery. This ordeal leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans. The killer traces Stella to Elinor’s and she must outrun both danger and the persecution of the Sparrow family. Jenny comes to the aid of her daughter and is reunited with her own mother, reclaiming her family’s legacy. Stella uses her gift to stop the killer and free her ancestor of an age-old injustice.

Diamond

Based on: "Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, And Margie Richard's Fight To Save Her Town" by Ronnie Greene

The black townsfolk of Diamond, Louisiana are church-going, hard-working, honest people. They are also sick, dying, injured by explosions and fires. Living on a former plantation in the shadow of a Shell Oil refinery, helplessness consumes their hope. When Peace Core worker and Louisiana native, Ann Rolfes, brings forward her stories of Shell’s shocking abuses in Nigeria — she and Diamond resident Margie Richard join forces to bring Diamond’s story to an international platform and stand up against the corporation and its environmental crimes.

After years of mysterious fires and neighbors falling sick and dying, Margie Richard, a retired Louisiana schoolteacher, took matters into her own hands. She led a lengthy battle against the pair of Shell petrochemical plants that bookend the African-American community of Diamond in Norco, a small town upriver of New Orleans amid the toxic skein of industry dubbed Cancer Alley.

Shell wasn’t just a health menace; it was the town’s main employer, and community support largely broke along racial lines.

Anne Rolfes, a fellow Louisianan, goes to Nigeria with the Peace Corps and bears witness to Shell’s stranglehold on the area and the government’s complicity in its horrors. Members of he native Ogoni tribe are pushed out and those who speak for them are shot at, abused and jailed. As the Peace Corps pulls out the increasingly dangerous area, Anne Rolfes is inspired to act. She writes “The Passport Book” which indicts Shell for its activities in Nigeria.

Anne’s efforts fall on deaf ears back in America, but she is lead to Margie, whose fight against Shell has grown strong. With a steely mix of faith and ingenuity, Richard led a grass roots effort, setting up a Web cam to broadcast illegal venting of toxic chemicals, and distributing buckets to the community to install their own atmospheric monitors. When she realized there wasn’t enough power in Diamond to turn around a huge multinational corporation, she traveled to Nigeria to view the hardships suffered by the Ogoni people in the Niger delta around the Royal Dutch / Shell plants. Working with a coalition of activists, she traveled to climate treaty negotiations being held at The Hague in the Netherlands. Accompanied by a documentary film crew, she invited Shell company executives to take a breath of Norco’s air and drink the polluted water sample she took in Lagos. Two weeks later, a top Shell executive from London was knocking on her trailer door in Diamond.

After a period of twelve years of organizing (1990-2002), Margie’s efforts succeeded when Shell agreed to invest more than $20 million in emission reduction and paid a minimum of $80,000 to each homeowner in a four-block area near the plants in Diamond — an offer everybody accepted. This was a historic victory for fence-line communities in the U.S. (predominantly impoverished and African-American). In 2004 Richard became the first African American to win the $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Rise and Shine

Based on the novel by Anna Quindlen
Development: Fox Searchlight

Meghan is America’s sweetheart, host of the famous morning show, “Rise and Shine.” Bridget is a social worker in a women’s shelter in the Bronx. The Fitzmaurice sisters, accomplished women in their forties, are best friends — although their salaries, experiences, and private lives couldn’t be farther apart. When their worlds strangely collide, the true bond of family is tested in the face of loss.

Based on the best-selling novel by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anna Quindlen, "Rise and Shine" follows the story of Bridget and Meghan Fitzmaurice who have been incredibly close ever since they were orphaned as little girls. Now in their forties, they both live in New York City but, in spite of their closeness, the worlds they inhabit couldn’t be more different. Meghan, 47, hosts Rise and Shine, America’s number one morning show. She makes $10 million a year and is probably the most famous woman on television. She travels the world for stories, and lives in New York dining with the rich and famous, while her husband Evan works on Wall Street and their son Leo attends Amherst College.

Opting for more grit than glamour in her life, Bridget, 43, works in social services as the director of a Bronx shelter for battered and drug addicted women, averting crises daily. Her passion for giving other people hope is stronger than her desire to be famous or make a lot of money, and she’s incredibly self-possessed without realizing it. She dates a salty 67 year old cop, Irving, who is no nonsense but loveable and old fashioned. What follows is a story in the realms of spectacle vs. reality, of how the sisters adapt, survive, and manage to bring the whole teeming world of New York to heel by dint of their smart mouths, quick wits, and the powerful connection between them that even the worst tragedy cannot shatter.