‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ - 27 East

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‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’

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An image from Liz Garbus' documentary

An image from Liz Garbus' documentary "What Happened

author on Jul 30, 2020

This week, the Hamptons Doc Fest added another “Fest Favorite” film — “What Happened, Miss Simone?” — to its website, hamptonsdocfest.com.

“What Happened, Miss Simone?” was not only the Spotlight Film at the documentary film festival in December 2015, but its award-winning director Liz Garbus was the winner of the festival’s Filmmakers’ Choice Award.

The film, which opened the Sundance Film Festival earlier that year, follows the life of the African-American piano prodigy and singer Eunice Waymon from North Carolina, who became the celebrated husky torch singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s complex and troubled bipolar life, which ended in France in 2003 at the age of 70, has become the focus over the years, of two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, three films, and a tribute album.

Other films also still available through the Hamptons Doc Fest website, most with Q&As from the directors’ appearances at the Hamptons Doc Fest film festival in previous years, are “Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life,” “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” “In Search of Israeli Cuisine,” “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,” “The Biggest Little Farm,” “Three Identical Strangers,” “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” “Spielberg,” “Life, Animated,” “Very Semi-Serious,” “Free Solo,” “To a More Perfect Union: U.S. v. Windsor,” “Marvin Booker Was Murdered,” the new first-run documentary “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” “Dads” for Father’s Day, “Pick of the Litter,” “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” the new first-run documentaries “John Lewis: Good Trouble” and “Spaceship Earth,” and last week’s offering “A Moment in Time: Hamptons Artists.”

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