AAfter a year that often seemed more fiction than fact, 2021 offers a series of documentaries that, like many of us, had other plans for 2020. Movies released last year on superstars like Rihanna, Billie Eilish and the Beatles are now on track for 2021 debuts. Some, like Questlove’s film at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, seem to fit the country’s cultural settling down with racial injustice, while Antoine Fuqua’s film of the NBA’s closing in March directly addresses the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests itself. With many release dates still in motion due to ongoing logistical concerns, here are eight of the most anticipated documentaries of 2021:
Rihanna
The long-running project between director Peter Berg and the multi-link pop star and beauty / fashion mogul was one of many high-profile celebrity movies delayed by the pandemic. The as-yet-untitled film promises to provide an intimate, characteristically disarming look at the Barbadian star’s expanded career as she transitioned from her most critically-acclaimed 2016 album, Anti, to the launch of her own Fenty beauty line, and the first black woman who led a luxury line for LMVH. Berg has reportedly collected over 1,200 hours of footage in five years, and the cameras are still running – “every time we think we finish the movie and release it, she’s like starting a fashion line like Fenty, or her lingerie line, or her skincare line, ”he said in an interview – but is aiming for a release 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 couldn’t be televised)
The premiere at this year’s (virtual) Sundance film festival, Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) marks the directorial debut of Roots drummer and Tonight Show staple Questlove. Fittingly, the film explores the Harlem Cultural Festival – the “Black Woodstock” – a series of concerts held simultaneously with the more famous (and very white) rock festival held 100 miles to the north in the summer of 1969. Questlove’s film revisits the festival for black. pride and heritage, which attracted more than 300,000 visitors and hosted performances from Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, BB King and the Staples Sisters, and lives up to its cultural legacy with hours of restored footage that was previously unchecked and unseen for 50 years in a cellar.
Billie Eilish: The World’s a little blurry
Another lucrative streaming deal for a pandemic delayed music documentary is Billie Eilish, who signed her own $ 25 million deal with Apple TV + in 2019, in her own behind-the-fame documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry, which is on February 26 was released. The film, directed by RJ Cutler, follows the teenage queen of dark pop, now 19, as she released her amazing 2019 album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Starring her father Patrick O’Connell, mother Maggie Baird and brother / songwriting partner Finneas O’Connell, the film finds Eilish navigating the stream of critical acclaim (the Grammy wins, the industry hype), global superstar (175 million followers on Instagram), and some more everyday milestones for teens (get a driver’s license, still live at home with your parents).
Tiger
Released January 10 and 17, the two-part HBO series follows the 15-time grand winner from 1990s rising child prodigy to untouchable star, from the sex and substance abuse scandal that jeopardized his career to his comeback. at Masters 2019. The project, led by Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, A Private War) and Matthew Hamachek (Amanda Knox), is based on interviews from countless figures in the Woods orbit, including his former caddy and confidant Steve Williams. the English golf star Nick Faldo, the father of Earl Woods. biographer Peter McDaniel, his first love Dina Parr, and Rachel Uchitel, the nightclub manager whose relationship with the golfer sparked the scandal that exploded the golfer’s career and marriage to Elin Nordegren in 2009. Woods does not participate in the movie, although he is. contain unseen behind-the-scenes footage of his early and high school years.
MLK / FBI
Documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard’s acclaimed film about the FBI’s campaign of privacy invasion and harassment against the civil rights leader in the 1950s and 1960s will receive its digital theatrical release in the US on January 15, after weeks of praise for its timely, comprehensive portrait of the American surveillance. history is on the festival circuit. Working with a wealth of carefully preserved images and audio files, MLK / FBI delves into both the FBI’s nasty campaign to threaten King – as a civil rights activist, he was a “ subversive ” threat to the status quo – and the complications of the man, whose Marital transgressions and general humanity were armed against him by the chief of the bureau, J. Edgar Hoover. (The FBI went so far as to send Coretta Scott King a letter with proof of MLK’s alleged affair, along with a note urging him to commit suicide for the good of the movement, among many other damning details.)
The day when sports stopped
From director Antoine Fuqua and HBO, The Day Sports Stood Still tackles recent, sadly still relevant, history: the NBA’s abrupt shutdown due to the March 11, 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and the unprecedented (sorry, there’s no other word) discontinuation to top sport in the months that followed. Narrated by NBA star Chris Paul, a point guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder and the president of the NBA Players Association, the post also covers the prominent cultural role athletes played during the American summer that took into account racial injustice, and the NBA’s fraught return to play in “the bubble” in the second half of 2020.
The Beatles: Get Back
The Beatles: Get Back, coming to theaters and Disney + on August 27, is a project of faithful, painstaking restoration by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. Billed as a “unique cinematic experience that takes audiences back in time,” the film draws from 60 hours of footage filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg during recording sessions in 1969 (originally captured for his 1970 film Let It Be, about the making from the album of the same name), and over 150 hours of previously unheard of audio and the group’s final live performance on the rooftop of Apple’s Savile Row offices, London. Created in collaboration with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), the project has received the blessing of McCartney, who said he “loves” it.
The Klarsfelds
Amy Bloom’s documentary about Serge and Beate Klarsfeld animates the memories of the famous Nazi hunter couple, who exposed the Nazis in hiding in France after the war, with the feeling of a spy thriller. Bloom’s project, the release date has yet to be announced, comes from the production house of Alex Gibney, who is experiencing a fruitful 2020 with not one but three major releases as a director: the films Crazy, Not Insane and Totally Under Control and the mini-series Agents of Chaos.