Some songs travel further than the people who write them. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is a 2022 feature documentary that makes exactly that situation its organising idea, following the songwriter Leonard Cohen through the one composition sung far beyond his own recordings. Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine direct, across 118 minutes.
What is Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song about?
Two lines run through the film and keep crossing. One is a working life: Cohen as poet, songwriter and performer, seen largely through his own voice and through material drawn from the archive. The other belongs to a single composition. "Hallelujah" is handled almost as a subject in its own right, a song that grew internationally renowned and travelled outward through many voices rather than one definitive version. The directors move between the strands, measuring each stage of the writing career against what the song was doing at the time; conversations and performance footage carry the rest.
About the cast
The participants come from across Cohen's working life and the circle that formed around the song. Cohen himself is present throughout, through archive interviews and recorded performance. The other participants credited here are Larry Sloman, Adrienne Clarkson, Judy Collins, Clive Davis, John Lissauer, Nancy Bacal and Rabbi Mordecai Finley. Their contributions stay conversational rather than ceremonial, each speaking from a particular vantage point.
Context & significance
Geller and Goldfine work in the long-form American documentary tradition, where archive access and first-hand witnesses carry most of the storytelling weight. A 2022 release running just under two hours, it sits with those music documentaries that use one song as a lens on an entire career. The catalogue's three genres, biography, documentary and music, divide the running time fairly accurately: enough life story, enough performance, and enough about drafting and revision to hold anyone curious about how songs get built. Faith, doubt and the vocabulary of scripture run through the source material, presented as part of the writing rather than as argument.
Watching Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song on Ktime
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song streams on K-Time. This page is open to everyone; playback starts once you sign in to a K-Time account. The title carries both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can watch with Farsi audio or keep the original sound and read along, in a Farsi interface.