The fast-paced career of Amy Winehouse and her untimely death at 27 due to alcohol poisoning are still fresh in our collective memory. Asif Kapadia, the director of the biographical doc SENNA about racer Ayrton Senna, attempts to showcase a more intimate side of a well-documented woman beloved by the tabloids. He gathered an impressive amount of material from friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. A lot of it is home-movie quality, there is footage of countless Grammy Awards and talk shows but Winehouse passed away before someone could shoot any documentary material on her. The images from Winehouses‘ first manager and good friend Nick Shymansky show Amy right at the start of her career: as a silly teen, singing happy birthday at a party, goofing off on tour, and showing her hotel room to a friend. Amy is a direct young woman who has fun singing, a person who did not believe she would have a music career and also didn’t seem to really want one for that matter. AMY is painstakingly detailed about the process which turned the talented woman into an emaciated victim of the paparazzi. Kapadia tries to uncover how the tragedy of her death could have been avoided. When her friends wanted her to go to withdrawel treatment and her father was against it, it led to Amy’s song “Rehab“ which made her world-famous. Another upsetting example is her boyfriend-from-hell Blake Fielder-Civil who began taking hard drugs which led to a break-up and “Back to Black.“ The images are backed with voice-overs from her friends and companions. The helplessness and despair can still be heard in their voices. AMY is the most touching when the woman herself talks: in her songbooks that look like a schoolgirl’s diary with big, squiggly handwriting, and of course in the songs themselves, with the funny, sometimes heart-wrenching lyrics occasionally shown on-screen.

Hendrike Bake (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy