Bela Fleck’s African odyssey is the subject of Throw Down Your Heart, showing this week at the Cable Car Cinema. Fleck, himself, will be there Friday.

AP / Dave Martin

The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument, which he sheepishly admits is “associated with a white Southern stereotype.”

At every stop on a journey that takes him from Uganda to Tanzania to Gambia and finally to Mali, Fleck plays and records with gifted local musicians. Early in the film, a Ugandan villager insists that the common perception of Africa as a continent ravaged by war and disease is “just a very small bit of what Africa is,” and Throw Down Your Heart sets out to prove him right.

While traveling, Fleck encounters reminders of the slave trade. At a seaside port in what used to be German East Africa, he is told that an enslaved African, upon seeing the sea and the ship, understood that there would be no returning and was advised to “throw down your heart.”

Fleck, a gentle, curious man of few words and formidable talents, is a benign presence. In a Ugandan village his banjo accompanies several local musicians playing a 12-foot xylophone.

In Tanzania he collaborates with Anania Ngoliga, a master of the African thumb piano, an instrument consisting of metal tines of varying length attached to a wooden board. It is in Gambia that Fleck encounters the akonting, a primitive three-string forerunner of the banjo whose preservation is the mission of a troupe known as the Jatta Family.

In Mali he meets and plays with the great guitarist Djelimady Tounkara and the diva Oumou Sangare, a national idol and phenomenally gifted composer and singer. When Sangare sings a heartbreaking lament of “a worried songbird” searching for her father, you don’t need to know the language to be gripped by the force of her cry.

Bela Fleck will be appearing in person Friday at the Cable Car Cinema for a Q&A session and to play some songs following the screening.

****Throw Down Your Heart

Featuring: Bela Fleck, Oumou Sangare, Djelimady Tounkara. In English, Lusogan, Swahili, Jola, Bambarra and French, with English subtitles.

Rated: Not rated.