Billie

In 1971 the journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out to write the definitive biography of Billie Holiday and recorded more than two hundred hours of interviews with the people who had known her. The book was never written. Kuehl died in 1978, her body found on a street in Washington, and the death was recorded as a suicide; her sister, who speaks in the film, does not accept that finding. James Erskine's 2020 documentary uses those tapes for the first time and runs two stories through each other: Holiday's life and the life of the woman trying to tell it. The songs, from Strange Fruit to God Bless the Child, sit between the two. The film refuses to reduce Holiday to a single sentence.