Winehouse documentary to feature unseen footage of singer

PARIS – A documentary on the life of tragic British singer Amy Winehouse will feature unseen footage of the late star, the company handling its sale at the Cannes film festival said on Thursday.

Focus Features International, a division of US entertainment giant NBCUniversal, said it would be taking the as yet untitled film to next month’s Riviera movie extravaganza.

The five-time Grammy award-winning singer died in July 2011 aged 27 from accidental alcohol poisoning. She had suffered years of drug and alcohol addiction.

“Using unseen archive footage, the film will show through her own words the genius in Amy’s art and the moving and tragic story of this young woman from London,” Focus Features said in a statement, adding that it would “introduce the project to buyers in Cannes”.

The film is a collaboration between British director Asif Kapadia and producer James Gay-Rees, whose acclaimed documentary on the late Formula One driver Ayrton Senna won them two BAFTAs.

Kapadia and Gay-Rees described Winehouse as a “once-in-a-generation talent who captured everyone’s attention”.

“She wrote and sung from the heart and everyone fell under her spell. But tragically Amy seemed to fall apart under the relentless media attention, her troubled relationships, her global success and precarious lifestyle,” they said in the statement.

Alongside the race for the Palme d’Or prize, Cannes is also a huge marketplace drawing thousands of people, from producers and distributors haggling over upcoming movies, to screenwriters hawking their scripts and firms offering innovations in computer-generated imagery.