It looks like we’ll have to amend our most-anticipated festival premieres of the fall, as one of them has been removed from all line-ups. Directed by the late Sydney Pollack, Amazing Grace tracks the recording of Aretha Franklin‘s live album at The New Temple Missionary Church in Los Angeles. Filmed back in 1972, the resulting footage of over 20 hours was locked up in the Warner Bros. fault for nearly four decades, but now it’s finally been edited and was ready to show.
Set to premiere at Telluride and then stop by TIFF, both screenings are no longer as THR reports Franklin herself filed for an emergency injunction to stop the distribution of the film. She states it “improperly used her name and likeness and required her consent for distribution.” While a trailer is still up, it remains to be seen when we’ll see any footage from the project, but one can check back for updates.
In the meantime, TIFF will hold the screening of another music documentary, this one coming from Amy Berg and tracking the life of the late Janis Joplin. We said in our review out of Venice, “Credit to the director, Joplin’s latter years are handled with a tremendous degree of delicacy. Neither drugs nor death are exploited for cheap emotional response. The tragedy is laid out evidently and clear. Up until this point you could have played Janis and Kapadia’s Amy side-by-side and found little narrative difference. Fame took its pound of flesh from Joplin of course, but the two women lived in very different worlds. Free from any sort of comparable media attention, Janis enjoys a trip to Rio to get clean. She succeeds for the time being, even finding a lover, and generally looks to be managing quite well. She breaks from the band and finds a new creative freedom. Of course the whims of the gods can be brutal, as we soon learn.”
Check out the first clip below.
Janis premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will air on PBS.