Director Asif Kapadia poses for photographers during a photo call for the film Amy, at the 68th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 16, 2015. As far as Kapadia is concerned, his documentary on Amy Winehouse lets no one off the hook ??? not the inner circle who enabled her addiction, not the media who aggressively documented and perhaps expedited her demise, and certainly not the public who observed it all with amused distance. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/AP

TORONTO - As far as director Asif Kapadia is concerned, his documentary on Amy Winehouse lets no one off the hook — not the inner circle who enabled her addiction, not the media who aggressively documented and perhaps expedited her demise, and certainly not the public who observed it all with amused distance.

Kapadia says he sympathizes with the family's grief and their sensitivity to criticism, but he's shaking off complaints from Winehouse's father that the film is "horrible" and inaccurate.

Mitch Winehouse claims that it portrays him as an absentee dad who discouraged his troubled daughter from going to rehab and callously capitalized on her fame even at her lowest points.

"I'm not picking on a single person," Kapadia said recently in Toronto.

"The film's aim is to make people feel: 'Oh God, I've seen all this material, and I really like Amy Winehouse. She's great — she's really funny. It's terrible what happened to her.' Turn the camera and the mirror to the audience, the journalists, and all of us who were somehow complicit in what happened to her.

"I'm hoping with time, certain people will look at it and say: 'Yeah, it's not just me. It's everyone.'

"Other members of the family —who don't necessarily look like they made great decisions for her — have privately said: 'I'm not comfortable with everything in the film, but it's honest.'"

Opening with a 14-year-old Winehouse casually stunning her pals by belting out "Happy Birthday" in her smoke-singed voice, "Amy" benefits from Kapadia's access to hours of intimate personal videos, hand-scribbled lyrics, and interviews with friends, collaborators and family (who originally supported the project).

We see Winehouse before she eventually disappeared into addiction late in her career. She's dagger-sharp and disarmingly self-aware, bullishly strong-headed and, at the same time, emotionally brittle.

This Winehouse is especially unfamiliar to American audiences, who got to know her with her smash sophomore record "Back to Black" — issued after her descent into addiction.

"Over here, the line seemed to be: 'She's a trainwreck. She gets everything she deserved,'" Kapadia observed.

It's shattering, then, to become acquainted with Winehouse only to see her dissolve under pressures that the singer herself acknowledged she couldn't handle.

As he pursued interviews, Kapadia heard again and again that this film was happening too soon, a mere four years after Winehouse's 2011 death of alcohol poisoning.

But he felt that Winehouse's story — about a phenomenal talent unready for celebrity life, chewed up by a ravenous media and onlookers waiting to see her downfall through to its end — carried a sense of urgency.

"It was really important to make this film now, not wait 10 years," said the "Senna" director.

"We were just so judgmental ... we basically formed an opinion on a kid with mental illness.

"There's people who claim to love her but they're hounding her ... these mad fans hanging outside her door," he added.

"People buying tickets to see someone who's really not in a good state. And is that because you want to see them before they die?"

Kapadia spotlights Winehouse's oft-overlooked lyrics, which laid out her ongoing personal crisis in startlingly frank terms.

He also notes that Winehouse herself called out her father's absentee status: "It's Amy who says 'my dad wasn't around' in her lyrics — it's not me saying it."

But of course, there's blame enough for everyone.

"The records people were dancing to were actually kind of a cry for help," Kapadia said.

"But people just kept on dancing."

———

"Amy" opens Friday in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal before expanding to other Canadian cities July 17.

Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2015