Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, December 1: AMY
Asif Kapadia’s look at the short life and career of Amy Winehouse made its bow at Cannes this year. Since then, it has screened at DOC NYC, Edinburgh, New Zealand, Vancouver, Traverse City, Sydney, East End, Munich, Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Poland’s New Horizons, Sarajevo, and Biografilm, among several others.
Like his masterful feature documentary debut, SENNA, Kapadia expertly crafts his portrait of the superstar performer almost entirely through archival material, including previously unseen home movies and behind-the-scenes footage. Taking on a public figure who was obsessively covered in the mainstream media, the director offers a strikingly candid alternative perspective without sugar-coating Winehouse’s struggles with addiction and difficulty handling the pressures of celebrity. The result is an intensely human, moving reconsideration of a gifted young woman who mercilessly became dismissed as a hopeless trainwreck by tabloids and a public only too willing to indulge in schadenfreude.
what (not) to doc 