"Amy Winehouse documentary breaks box office records!"

A star is born — all over again. Asif Kapadia’s documentary study of the great British soul queen Amy Winehouse, who died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27, is stunningly moving and powerful: intimate, passionate, often shocking, and almost mesmerically absorbing.

Kapadia’s documentary charts Winehouse’s story from her childhood in Southgate, north London, to her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011. In similar style to Senna, his 2010 film about the Formula One driver, the director avoids showing his interviewees on screen, and instead mixes audio from new interviews with Amy’s parents, childhood friends and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, with archive footage.

Implicit in the trailer is the film’s sense of Winehouse as a victim of success. The singer – who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression and bulimia – was plagued by the press and shocked by the attention that her bluntly honest songs and remarkable voice attracted. 

“I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous,” says a pre-fame Winehouse in the trailer. She became, of course, extraordinarily famous. Her problems became her songs, which became her image, which made her – for better or worse – an icon. 

Interview Recording - Terry Derkach