U.S. audiences will get the chance to see the story behind Helen Reddy’s epic roar. Unjoo Moon’s biopic of the Australian “I Am Woman” singer has secured North American distribution via Aqute Media. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news.
Penned by Emma Jensen (“Mary Shelley”), “I Am Woman” recalls how Reddy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey, “Hotel Mumbai”), a single mother who moved to the U.S. with hopes of a career in music, overcame the odds — and proved sexist music execs skeptical of a market for her music wrong — by becoming an international superstar. The film, which made its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and opened the 2020 Athena Film Festival, pays special tribute to Reddy’s feminist anthem, “I Am Woman.”
“Helen Reddy became a superstar in the U.S., which had always been her dream,” said Rosemary Blight, who produced alongside Moon. “Goalpost Pictures is thrilled that ‘I Am Woman’ has found such a passionate home in the U.S. as Aqute, which will steer the film to find the U.S. audience that Helen deserves for her story.”
“I am not old enough to have ever attended a Helen Reddy concert, or to have known too many of the details of her career, but even as a young child I have vivid memories of the way my mother and her friends used to talk about Helen,” Moon told us. “The 1970s were a time of change – for everything. Fashion, music, food, politics, relationships, and, most importantly, the roles of women were being questioned and challenged. Women were having careers, becoming financially independent, and getting divorced. Even then I knew that somehow Helen Reddy seemed to be an important part of all this change. When her songs came on the radio, my mother and her friends would immediately turn up the volume, wind down the windows in their station wagons, and let their hair loose in the breeze. And there were the rallies where women marched for equal rights and equal pay, and linked arms to sing and declare ‘I am woman, hear me roar,'” she recalled. “It wasn’t until later in life that I began to fully understand the impact of the women’s movement and how it fundamentally changed so many things for women all over the world.”
Moon directed the 2012 doc “The Zen of Bennett.”
