Iconic Jazz Singer Billie Holiday Is Center of New Documentary

Billie Holiday will be featured in the upcoming documentary Billie, directed by James Erskine, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The feature will include never-before-heard interviews, music and archived footage provided by the indie music label group Concord, which holds the rights to Holiday’s estate.

Concord, New Black Films’ Victoria Gregory and Barry Clark-Ewers and REP Documentary’s Laure Vaysse will produce the documentary.

The film will follow the account of Holiday’s life provided by literary journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who died in 1979 before completing her intended biography on the jazz singer.

Billie will contain a compilation of more than 200 hours of interviews done with the “Strange Fruit” singer’s contemporaries including Sarah Vaughn, Count Basie and Tony Bennett. Others featured will include Holiday’s drug dealers, pimps, cellmates, lawyers and the FBI agents who arrested her for narcotics use.

“We are thrilled to be working with the creative team of James Erskine and New Black Films, who have taken great care to produce a documentary that honors the life and work of Billie Holiday in an exciting, genre-defying way,” Sophia Dilley, vice president of film and TV development and production for Concord, said in a statement.

Billie is in post-production and has been pre-sold internationally to studios in Australia, New Zealand, France and Switerzland.