Filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Senna) is releasing his documentary Amy about the late great singer Amy Winehouse this summer. The film juxtaposes archival footage of a young, pre-updo Winehouse with interviews with her non-celebrity friends, her manager, her father Mitch Winehouse, and her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced her to crack and heroin. They divorced two years prior to her death in 2011 from alcohol poisoning. She was 27.
In Amy, a friend says Amy worshipped the ground her father walked on. They had a complicated relationship. Her father left the family when Amy was nine. And then there was that time Mitch apparently told Amy she didn’t need to go to rehab in 2005. She sang in the song Rehab: “I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine…” According to The New Republic, Mitch gave his blessing to the film but “has since distanced himself from it, claiming Kapadia edited out the crucial last clause of his assessment: ‘She didn’t need to go to rehab at that time.’”
