Amy Winehouse documentary reclaims singer’s musical legacy, but angers her

But, moreover, here is a heartbreaking documentary that perpetuates her legacy with vigor, candor, and profundity that, just like Winehouse herself, never pulls any punches.

Anyone who listened to music in the last ten years is familiar with Winehouse and her powerhouse five-time 2008 Grammy award-winning album “Back to Black”.

“The reason I did this is actually to focus on her brilliance”, Shymansky reiterates. She was an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent, and she just needed the tools to assist her – if the appropriate coping mechanisms had been imparted along the way, from childhood, through to her years in the spotlight, things could have been very different. I don’t know… she looked like she didn’t care any more but it looked like her only way out.

“She’s amusing!” director Asif Kapadia gushed in an interview with ETonline. I went to give her a hug and got a reaction like: “I’m fine, chill out, no big deal”.

“Mitch and Reg are talking about doing something to correct all the wrongs and omissions in the new film”, a source told the Mirror.

Amy will premiere at the NZ worldwide Film Festival later this month. Although its story is a familiar one-both on the “pitfalls of fame” level and the details of Winehouse’s well-documented downfall-the film remains engrossing. Not the case for “Amy“. Still, as he seems to have realized, to release Winehouse’s demos would be to have someone else work on music that she never intended to be heard. “Along one long wall we had, like in a bad cop show, Post-It Notes, then lines between them, trying to connect the dots – what is the bloody story?” It is evident that the process of the film was about what made Amy tick.

Folks at the record company weren’t the only ones impressed by “Senna”.

They gathered material, but the people he wanted most to participate – her first manager, Nick Shymansky, and lifelong friends Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert – were not interested. Brooklyn rapper Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) appears in the film as well. She adored her husband Blake Fielder, seen here as a junkie who did little but bask in her reflected glory and restock her with heroin whenever she managed to get clean.

They’re all vital components of the movie. It turned out that Amy was a very complicated person. Cosbert had divided loyalties: To do one part of his job, he had to keep her on the road – even, as it turns out, when that wasn’t in her best interest.

As it is, his elegantly composed memento mori leaves us with a deep sense of sadness and anger as we watch the singer totter towards oblivion, seemingly with no one to shepherd her away from the edge.

A Winehouse family spokesman said: “Mitch and the family are exploring the possibility of a film that would include all the people who really knew Amy which the current documentary misses out”. Leave me alone and I will do the music.

Kapadia says: “The film is an honest representation of all our research and it’s my version of a musical where the songs are the narrative”.

“I’m kind of easygoing”, says the director over an espresso in a central London private member’s bar.