This weekend, Donna Summer’s trailblazing career and complicated life gets the documentary treatment with HBO’s Love to Love You, Donna Summer. Summer’s daughter Brooklyn Sudano and the film’s co-director Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams examine the disco icon’s life and offer an intimate portrait of a private, almost secretive woman, whose relationship to fame, the people who knew her and even her own self remained complicated until she died of lung dancer at age 63.
Archival interviews with Summer and never-before-scene footage shape much of the documentary,...
Archival interviews with Summer and never-before-scene footage shape much of the documentary,...
- 5/20/2023
- by Brittany Spanos
- Rollingstone.com
Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer’s daughter), it’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was. We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair”, or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.
- 3/15/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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