Amy, Senna director Asif Kapadia’s documentary about tragic singer Amy Winehouse premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, earning almost unanimous praise from the critics. But even before its premiere the film found itself making headlines in recent weeks, after the late singer’s family withdrew their support for the project last month.
Amy’s family have withdrawn support for the film.
Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father, said he felt the doc painted him as an absentee father and told The Sun newspaper in April “I felt sick when I watched it for the first time. Amy would be furious. This is not what she would have wanted.”
After the film’s premiere much has been made of one scene in particular involving Mitch, where Amy is seen telling her father ‘Are you only interested in me for what you can get out of me?’ When he comes to visit her in St Lucia with a camera crew in tow.
More: Amy Winehouse’s Father Mitch Says Daughter “Would Be Furious” Over Upcoming Documentary
Writing in The Independent Geoffrey MacNabb said it was easy to understand why Mitch is upset at the film. “My dad was never there,” she says of her childhood,” MacNabbs writes. “There is an excruciating scene in which he turns up in St Lucia, where she is trying to hide away, with a camera crew in tow. However, Kapadia isn’t making any of this up and there is no sense he is out to demonise Mitch.”
Variety calls the doc, ‘factually exhaustive and emotionally exhausting’, adding that the ‘lengthy but immersive portrait will hit hard with viewers who regard Winehouse among the great lost voices not just of a generation, but of an entire musical genre’.
More: The Haunting Voice Of Amy Winehouse Is Back In Documentary, Amy
The Hollywood Reporter adds that Amy ‘is an emotionally stirring and technically polished tribute’. “Its sprawling mass of diverse source material elegantly cleaned up, color-corrected and shaped into a satisfying narrative,” writes Stephen Dalton. “If Kapadia’s film feels like an incomplete story, that is mainly because Winehouse’s life was itself incomplete.”
Amy will receive its UK premiere at this year’s Glastonbury Festival beginning on June 24th. The film will then open in UK cinemas on July 3rd.
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