Arena Season 2020

Ike White was a gifted and critically acclaimed musician whose talent was discovered while he was serving a life sentence for murder. When he was released, he went into hiding under a pseudonym for decades. Masking his dark past, he had an incredible story that he hadn't told a soul.

Narrated entirely in the words of James Baldwin, through both personal appearances and the text of his final unfinished book project, this film touches on the lives and assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers. The film brings powerful clarity to how the images and reality of black lives in America today are fabricated and enforced.

In 1997, over one million people gathered in Lagos for the funeral of Fela Kuti, Africa’s biggest artist, who gave the world Afrobeat, yet was also a thorn in the side of Nigeria’s military regimes - a revolutionary who fought injustice with his music and a libertine who married 27 wives in one ceremony. When he died from a disease that carried huge stigma in Africa, there was fear his legacy would die with him. Exclusive testimony reveals the multifaceted man behind the maverick performer.