Amy
By Kit Macdonald
Verdi's music-focused Verdi Club series returns with a bang on Friday with Ash Kapadia's harrowing documentary about the life and tragic death of Amy Winehouse. Like Senna, Kapadia's portrait of the late, great F1 racing driver Ayrton Senna, Amy is made in the docu-collage style, and is comprised of archival TV footage, home video material and interviews with people who knew her.
Starting with a 1998 home movie of the 14-year-old Winehouse singing along with her longtime friend, Juliette Ashby, at a birthday party in London, we are taken from her early childhood to the blossoming of her music career and her troubled relationships, self-harm, eating disorder, troubles with addiction, and her death in 2011. The way Amy is assembled puts the singer herself front and centre in almost every frame, giving an agonisingly close and intimate quality to the narrative as things spiral towards their inevitable conclusion. A superbly executed piece of work that won the Best Documentary Feature award at the 2016 Oscars.