The upcoming official Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin has been added to the lineup of the 2021 edition of Italy’s Venice International Film Festival, which runs from September 1 through September 11.
The movie will be screened as part of the out-of-competition section of the festival.
As previously reported, Becoming Led Zeppelin features new interviews with band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, as well as archival interviews with late drummer John Bonham.
The film, which was directed by Bernard McMahon, follows the individual paths of Led Zeppelin’s four members through their various groups and musical endeavors en route to becoming part of one of the biggest and most influential rock bands in the world. The documentary ends in 1970, at the height of Led Zeppelin’s meteoric rise.
“With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical,” McMahon says in a statement. “I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it.”
McMahon adds, “I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin’ in the Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.”
McMahon also directed American Epic, an award-winning documentary series focusing on American roots music and its impact on the world.
Becoming Led Zeppelin was co-written and produced by Allison McGourty, who also co-wrote American Epic.
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