“I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous,” predicts Amy Winehouse in the new documentary about her, which has opened to critical acclaim at Cannes 2015.
That statement was probably uttered before the five Grammys, the tens of millions of records sold, the nonstop tabloid coverage and, of course, the fame that killed her, according to Asif Kapadia’s “Amy.”
In the newly released first trailer for the doc, we see what Winehouse’s family and longtime friends saw: a shy, talented, relatively healthy young woman who was psychologically unprepared to deal with the pressures of celebrity.
In a wonderful interview with Indiewire, Kapadia explained, “What’s fascinating with Amy’s story is, in the U.S., her first album didn’t get a release. So people only know ‘Back to Black.’ For me, from the work that I’ve done and the research that I’ve done, sadly, the girl who released ‘Back to Black’ is kind of the shell of the human being that she was before. The person that we all knew isn’t really even Amy. That becomes the story; that becomes the revelation.
“Everything you know is kind of wrong, or a skewed version,” he continued. “That’s not really her hair. That’s not what she really looks like. That whole iconic image is basically unwrapping. That becomes quite powerful, that [we] know the ending.”
“Amy” will be released on July 3 in the UK and on July 10 in the US.
https://content.jwplatform.com/videos/NzfzTBKS-720.mp4
