Amy

The image that I always had of singer Amy Winehouse was that of a drunk girl with a beehive stumbling around London. But Asif Kapida's astonishing and terrifying documentary smashes that perception completely.

The film begins with a fourteen year old Amy singing happy birthday to her best friend Lauren Gilbert in 1998. The film then flashes forward three years to the beginning of Amy's career as a jazz singer. From here, we see her creative beginnings with the release of her first album Frank, through to the beginning of her troubles when meeting future husband Blake Fielder, the sudden rise to fame with her next album Back to Black, on which her most famous single "Rehab" was a part and then her downfall when she started to do heroin and crack cocaine.

This documentary is so sad because despite starting off with a cheery hopeful girl who just wants to make music, you ultimately know how the story ends. But even in those early years, we find that not everything was as happy as the footage we see presents itself. She suffered from bulimia, and although she said she was okay with the fact that her father left her family when she was young, you can really see how much an impact it had on her, especially in the interactions she had with her father later in her life.

Mitch Winehouse (her father) has come out and condemned this film for the portrayal of Amy and his family, but it seems as though he is only covering himself. I don't think he was portrayed in any way other than how he appears in footage that is presented, as someone who only came back into Amy's life once she started to make a lot of money. Also her husband Blake Fielder impacted negatively on Amy's life, although he came across hugely regretful of what he did to her in introducing heroin to her life. The other group that comes across negatively in this film is that of the media, especially the paparazzi. Toward the end of the film there are entire sequences of footage that I found unable to watch because of the amount of camera flashes. This level of fame began to weigh on Amy, as all she wanted to do was make music.

What I thought was really powerful is that this film is made up entirely of archive footage taken by Amy, her friends like Nick Shymanksy and her bodyguard Andrew Morris (who considered her family), as well as television interviews and concert footage. All the interviews are audio over these images and we don't see a single person as they appear today. This really lends weight to the fact that this documentary is all about the talented life of Amy Winehouse.

Ultimately, it is a sad and reverential film that will leave you stunned after you watch it for a while. If only she had have lived longer to complete her dream of created a supergroup made up of Yasiin Bey (formally known as Mos Def), Questlove of the Roots, Raphael Saadiq and herself. If you don't know who any of those people are, let me tell you, it would have been the best band ever.