Amy Winehouse’s Family Blasts New Documentary
A new Amy Winehouse documentary called Amy is set to debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and we posted the trailer earlier this month. But Winehouse’s family, who initially cooperated with the filmmakers on the doc, are deeply pissed about how it turned out, and they’re considering legal action. People reports that the family members feel that the movie depicts them as enablers who ignored Winehouse’s problems and profited from her success. Mitch Winehouse, her father, even claims that the movie accuses him of taking money from the Amy Winehouse Foundation, an addiction charity that Winehouse’s family set up after her death.
Talking to People, the family has given an angry statement that they want to “disassociate themselves” from the movie:
It is both misleading and contains some basic untruths… The narrative is formed by the testimony of a narrow sample of Amy’s associates, many of whom had nothing to do with her in the last years of her life. Counter views expressed to the filmmakers did not make the final cut.
Winehouse’s father says, “I felt sick when I watched it for the first time. Amy would be furious. This is not what she would have wanted.”
According to the family, the movie depicts Mitch as an absentee stage dad, and it downplays the role that Winehouse’s husband Blake Fielder-Civil played in her life. A spokesperson for the movie doesn’t deny any of those claims: “We came on board with the full backing of the Winehouse family and we approached the project with total objectivity… We conducted in the region of 100 interviews with people that knew Amy. The story that the film tells is a reflection of our findings from these interviews.”