Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

As magical a singer as Youssou Ndour is this documentary about his life and music gets real old real fast. Considering the filmmakers had his complete cooperation one wonders why docs like this don't include full concert versions of the man's songs instead of a snippet here or a verse there. I Bring What I love will play strong to worldwide fans of the Senegal born Ndour but its prosaic production values would fit in better with cable network programming.
Talking points are the history of griot style singers, or songsters whose music tells stories. Ndour proudly upholds this traditional style of singing as much as he embraces Sufism a mystical denomination of Islam. Other parts of the film deal with Ndour in the Senegalese city of Touba, a holy city for followers of Mouridism and explains its connection to Muslim mystic and spiritual leader Amadou Bamba. Certainly the film doesn't preach so much as inform.
When I Bring What I Love ends you feel like you know Ndour if only superficially since the viewer is on the front row of his mid-decade world tour for his recording Egypt. Glimpses into Ndour's backstage entourage as well as his family have a home movie feeling. Sacrificing animals for food is a part of the family's bonding and doesn't seem cruel at all as depicted here and compared to similar sequences in other films.