REP Film Club: Amazing Grace

Winner for the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary – Film

Nominee for the 2018 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction Film

“Amazing Grace” is the two-day-concert recording of what remains Franklin’s (and live gospel music’s) best and biggest-selling album. When Warner Bros. hired Sydney Pollack in 1972, he was a youngish, on the rise director who was without a large body of work yet.  The studio did not know how to market the film so it was put on a shelf and forgotten.  When Franklin died last year, it was pulled off the shelf, digitized and cleaned up.  Nearly 50 years after it was filmed, it was finally released at a Chicago film festival in April 2019.