Joan Baez: I Am a Noise (2023)
Director: Karen O'Connor, Maeve O'Boyle, Miri Navasky Run Time: 113 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Bob Dylan, David Harris, Joan Baez, Mimi Fariña
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
Official Selection, 2023 Berlin Film Festival
Joan Baez I Am A Noise (2023) is an unusually intimate psychological portrait of legendary folk singer and activist Joan Baez. Neither a conventional biopic nor a traditional concert film, this immersive documentary moves back and forth through time as it follows Joan on her farewell tour and delves into her extraordinary archive, including newly discovered home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings.
Throughout the film, Baez is remarkably revealing about her life on and off stage – from her lifelong emotional struggles to her civil rights work with MLK and a heartbreaking romance with a young Bob Dylan. A searingly honest look at a living legend, this film is a compelling and deeply personal exploration of an iconic artist who has never told the full truth of her life, as she experienced it, until now.
About the filmmakers:
Karen O’Connor is an award-winning producer, writer, and director whose work with filmmaking partner Miri Navasky includes the Emmy-nominated The New Asylums (2005), a portrait of mentally ill prisoners, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Journalism Award; the Emmy-winning The Undertaking (2007), an exploration of mortality and grief; and the Emmy-nominated Growing Up Trans (2015), about the struggles and choices faced by transgender children and their parents, which won a duPont-Columbia Award in 2016.
Miri Navasky is an award-winning filmmaker who founded Mead Street Films with Karen O’Connor over twenty years ago. Their immersive and compelling documentaries address social issues and take audiences into rarely-seen worlds. They include the Banff-award-winning The Killer at Thurston High (2000) about a school shooting, and the Emmy-nominated The Suicide Plan (2012) about assisted dying.
Maeve O’Boyle is an award-winning filmmaker who has worked in various positions on numerous projects including as editor of the HBO documentary The Education of Mohammad Hussein (2013) which was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She co-produced and edited Firestone and the Warlord (2014) which won an Emmy and an IRE Award. In 2020, she directed, produced and edited the documentary The 8th (2020).
See our upcoming films