Asif Kapadia, the filmmaker behind Senna, is debuting a documentary about British pop singer Amy Winehouse at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, and if the teaser trailer is anything to go by, the documentary about her is going to be pretty heavy. It might be a little too heavy, according to her family, who told the BBC that the film, Amy, is “misleading.” Specifically, her father doesn’t like how he and the rest of her family are portrayed in the movie as “not being there to help Amy” when she needed them.
He acknowledges that Kapadia and the producers had the final say about what went in, and he knows that they couldn’t put in everything. However, he argues that “a biographer puts everything down there and lets people decide for themselves.” He says “the film could have been terrific,” but now he and the rest of the family are distancing themselves from Amy and have even put out a statement saying they’d “like to disassociate themselves” from it.
As for the people who actually made the movie, they stand by Amy and claim that they “approached the project with total objectivity.” They say they “conducted in the region of 100 interviews,” and that they believe the film is an accurate reflection of their findings. Amy will be in British theaters in July, but no American release has been announced yet.