Fascinating documentary of singer songwriter, Janis Ian, BREAKING SILENCE is just one of the highlights of this year’s Jewish Film Festival.
A child prodigy, Janis Ian was a fledgling teenager when she penned Society’s Child about mixed race relationships, the song championed by Leonard Bernstein, that saw her both praised and pilloried, but nevertheless spring boarded her into early celebrity.
Nasty Bill Cosby, cognisant that sexual slurs could terminate careers in that unenlightened time, accused her of being a lesbian. So what if she swings both ways? Her adolescent affair with a man, her first adult fling with a female her marriage to an older man, her affair with a woman, and her marriage to a woman. She tilts towards women.
She took on apartheid on her own terms, boycotting the cultural boycott by touring South Africa with the stipulation of no segregation of audience or musicians.
Most people know Janis Ian from her songs, At Seventeen Jesse, Fly Too High. She performed them to chart success. She was also covered by Mel Torme, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone and Bette Middler.
BREAKING SILENCE chronicles the singer’s epic life journey beginning with her Jewish childhood on a chicken farm in New Jersey; her youthful struggle with notoriety, her ascent to fame with the single “At Seventeen”; and her release of the disruptive album Breaking Silence which she leveraged to come out publicly about her loving relationship with her wife, Pat Snyder.
With access to Janis Ian’s incredible body of music, her vast archive, family, friends, famed collaborators, and music journalists, writer director Varda Bar-Kar creates an in-depth musical film, told in three acts, with the intimacy of a home movie set against a sweeping historical context.
Unsung? Not bloody likely, and this film focuses on the extraordinary achievement of her talent, the legacy of joy that Janis Ian has created.
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Ritz Cinemas, Randwick | 28 Oct – 5 Dec. Roseville Cinemas, Roseville | 7 – 20 Novilspinonlyoemerge from the ashes with an
