Past screening

Billie

Directed by: James Erskine
Runtime: 1hr 36min Year: 2019
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Details

Directed by: James Erskine
Runtime: 1hr 36min Year: 2019
Country: United Kingdom
Topics: Music

Recorded Q&A

Billie

Crafted from extraordinary unheard interviews, and restoring key performances into colour for the first time, Billie is the story of the singer who changed the face of American music, and the journalist who died trying to tell it.

Her breath-taking talent has delighted and charmed fans around the world, but Billie Holiday’s story is one of struggle, strength and tragedy. In the late 1960s, journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out to write the definitive biography of Billie.

Over the next decade, she tracked down and recorded interviews with the extraordinary characters that populated the iconic singer’s short, tumultuous life. But Linda’s book was never finished, and 200-hours of taped interviews were never heard.

Painstakingly compiled from these original recordings, set to restored and even colorized footage of ‘Lady Day‘, Billie captures the singer’s depths and complexity, conjuring up her life through the haunting, brutally honest and intimate testimony of childhood friends, family, lovers, lawyers, pimps, pushers and musical greats including Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughn and Count Basie.

Recorded Q&A

Billie