More than two hundred hours of interview tape sat unheard for decades before James Erskine's documentary Billie put them to use. Released in 2020, the film approaches the singer known as Lady Day through the voices of the people who knew her, as recorded by a journalist who never finished her book.
What is Billie about?
In 1971 the journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl began work on what she intended to be the definitive biography of Billie Holiday. She interviewed anyone who would talk: musicians, friends, lovers, people who had seen Holiday at her best and at her lowest. By the time of Kuehl's own death in 1978, a death that remains unexplained, she had recorded over two hundred hours of conversation, and the book was never completed. Billie builds its portrait on those recordings. Rather than a tidy chronology, the film lets the tapes contradict one another, assembling a woman who was at once a proud Black artist, a loyal friend, a vindictive lover and someone in the grip of serious addiction. Running through everything is the music: the film returns to songs such as 'God Bless the Child', 'Saddest Tale' and the haunting 'Strange Fruit', and to the voice that made them impossible to forget.
About the cast
Billie is a documentary, so the catalogue lists no acting credits. Its central figures are two women who never share the screen: Holiday herself, present through her music, and Lipnack Kuehl, whose interviews supply the film's spine and whose own story gives it a second subject.
Context & significance
Billie Holiday's standing as one of the great jazz vocalists is not in question; what Erskine's 2020 film adds is access to testimony that no previous account could draw on. The documentary sits in a tradition of music films that rely on primary sources rather than present-day retrospectives, and its interest in the archive itself, how it was gathered and why it went unused, gives it a layer beyond the usual biographical arc. A United States production listed under documentary and music, it runs roughly 98 minutes and treats its subject's contradictions as the point rather than as problems to be smoothed over.
Watching Billie on Ktime
Billie streams on K-Time for account holders; log in to watch, while this page is free to read. The catalogue lists the film in its original English audio without a Persian dub or subtitles, so it suits viewers comfortable with English. K-Time's Farsi interface makes it easy to find the title among the service's documentary and music selections on television, mobile or web.