ANAfter a year that often seemed more fiction than fact, 2021 offers a list of documentaries that, like many of us, had different plans for 2020. Films due out last year about stars like Rihanna, Billie Eilish and the Beatles are now track for 2021 debut. Some, like the Questlove film at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, appear to fit the cultural calculation of the nation with racial injustice, while Antoine Fuqua’s film about the NBA closing in March directly addresses the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests themselves. . With many release dates still uncertain due to ongoing logistical concerns, here are eight of the most anticipated documentaries of 2021:
Rihanna
The long-term project between director Peter Berg and the multi-hyphenated pop star and beauty / fashion mogul was one of several high-profile celebrity films delayed by the pandemic. The still untitled film promises to provide an intimate and characteristically disarming look at the expansive career of the Barbados star as she transitioned from her most critically claimed album, Anti 2016, to launch her own beauty line Fenty, and become the first black woman to head a luxury line for LMVH. Berg reportedly amassed more than 1,200 hours of footage in five years, and the cameras are still recording – “every time we think we’re going to finish the film and release it, she does something like starting a fashion line like Fenty, or her line lingerie, or your skin care line, ”he said in an interview – but is planning a launch date on Amazon in the summer of 2021 (the streaming service acquired the project for a whopping $ 25 million in 2019).
Summer of Soul (… or when the revolution could not be televised)
Debuting at this year’s Sundance (virtual) film festival, Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Couldn’t Be Televised) marks the debut in the direction of Roots and Tonight Show drummer Questlove. Fittingly, the film explores the Harlem Cultural Festival – the “Black Woodstock” – a series of concerts held simultaneously with the most famous (and very white) rock festival held 160 kilometers north during the summer of 1969. Questlove’s film revisits the festival for blacks pride and heritage, which attracted more than 300,000 attendees and performed Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, BB King and the Staples Sisters, and honors their cultural legacy with hours of previously restored footage left unchecked and invisible for 50 years in a basement.
Billie Eilish: the world a little blurry
Another lucrative streaming business for a pandemic-delayed music documentary is Billie Eilish, who signed her own $ 25 million deal with Apple TV + in 2019, in her own documentary behind the fame, The Worlds a Little Blurry, released on February 26. The film, directed by RJ Cutler, follows the teenage queen of dark pop, now 19, as she develops and tours her 2019 hit album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Featuring her father Patrick O’Connell, mother Maggie Baird and brother / songwriting partner Finneas O’Connell, the film finds Eilish riding the wave of critical acclaim (Grammy wins, industry hype), global stardom ( 175 million Instagram followers) and some more mundane milestones in adolescence (getting a driver’s license, still living at home with your parents).
Tiger
HBO’s two-part series, launched on January 10 and 17, on the golf phenomenon tracks the 15-time winner of a rising prodigy in the 1990s to the untouchable star of the sex and substance abuse scandal that threatened her career until his comeback victory at the 2019 Masters. The project, directed by Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, A Private War) and Matthew Hamachek (Amanda Knox) is based on interviews of several figures in Woods’ orbit, including his former caddy and confidant Steve Williams, English golf star Nick Faldo, father of Earl Woods biographer Peter McDaniel, his first love Dina Parr, and Rachel Uchitel, the nightclub manager whose relationship with the golfer triggered the scandal that exploded the career of the golfer and the marriage to Elin Nordegren in 2009. Woods does not participate in the film, although he does present unpublished scenes from behind the scenes of his early years of school and high school.
MLK / FBI
The critically acclaimed film by documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard about the FBI’s invasion of privacy and harassment campaign against the civil rights leader during the 1950s and 60s will be released in digital theaters in the United States on January 15, after weeks of applause for his timely and expansive portrayal of America’s state history surveillance on the festival circuit. Working with a carefully preserved collection of images and audio files, MLK / FBI investigates both the FBI’s sordid campaign to threaten King – as a civil rights activist, he was a “subversive” threat to the status quo – and man’s complications , whose marital indiscretions and humanity in general were armed against him by the head of the agency, J Edgar Hoover. (The FBI even went so far as to send Coretta Scott King a letter with evidence of the alleged MLK case, along with a note urging him to kill himself for the sake of the movement, among many other damning details.)
The day sports stopped
From director Antoine Fuqua and HBO, The Day Sports Senance Still addresses recent history, unfortunately still relevant: the NBA’s abrupt closure to the coronavirus pandemic on March 11, 2020 and the unprecedented shutdown (sorry, there is no other word ) to professional sports in the following months. Narrated by NBA star Chris Paul, Oklahoma City Thunder playmaker and president of the NBA Players Association, the article also addresses the prominent cultural role played by athletes during the American summer of reckoning with racial injustice and those in the NBA playing again in the “bubble” in the second half of 2020.
The Beatles: Get Back
The Beatles: Get Back, which hits theaters and Disney + on August 27, is a faithful and meticulous restoration project by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. Billed as a “unique cinematic experience that takes audiences back in time”, the film is based on 60 hours of footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg during recording sessions in 1969 (originally captured for his film Let It Be, 1970s, on the making of the album of the same name), and more than 150 hours of audio never heard before and the group’s last live performance on the roof of Apple’s offices in Savile Row, London. Done in cooperation with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), the project received the blessing of McCartney, who said he “loves” him.
The Klarsfelds
Amy Bloom’s documentary about Serge and Beate Klarsfeld recalls the famous Nazi hunter couple, who exposed Nazis hiding in France after the war, in animation with the feel of a spy thriller. Bloom’s project, with a release date yet to be announced, comes from the production house of Alex Gibney, who is putting together a prolific 2020 with not one, but three major releases as a director: the films Crazy, Not Insane and Totally Under Control and the Agents of Chaos mini-series.