Haunting New Amy Winehouse Doc Trailer Shows Triumph, Decline
“The more people see of me, the more they’ll realize that all I’m good for is making music,” Amy Winehouse tells the camera in a haunting new trailer for the upcoming documentary Amy. Fresh off its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the filmmakers dropped the first full-length trailer, drawing out a heartbreaking narrative of artistic triumph and personal decline.
Directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna), the new film is packed with rare archival footage and previously unheard tracks from the singer, who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the age of 27.
Like the teaser trailer released in early April, the new clip depicts Winehouse’s discomfort with fame. It also drops some hints of her troubled relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil. “I fell in love with someone who I would have died for,” she says in the film. “And that’s like a real drug, isn’t it?”
The film has already drawn criticism from Winehouse’s family, who called the filmmakers “a disgrace” for portraying her father, Mitch Winehouse, as partially responsible for the singer’s descent into drugs and alcohol. Just as the film was garnering praise at Cannes, Reg Traviss, Winehouse’s partner at the time of her death, joined in the fray with a searing editorial in The Telegraph. Describing the film as “a fictionalised biopic centered around a distorted depiction of Amy’s life,” Traviss objects to the film’s depiction of Winehouse as “effectively dysfunctional” in her final two years.
“But what was so good about that period of her life was that it was a time when she had grown into somebody,” he writes. “At 27, she was very happy, she had a good bunch of friends, really good friends, around her. Her home life was good, too, with a lot of laughter. Her house in Camden was a busy, vibrant household, with a couple of flatmates and family members visiting every day.” He also calls the film’s portrayal of Mitch Winehouse “despicable.”
Amy hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles and the U.K. on July 3rd before going nationwide on July 10th.