Berlin: ‘Love To Love You, Donna Summer,’ From Roger Ross Williams & Summer’s Daughter, Brooklyn Sudano, Provides Complex Portrait Of Pop Superstar

deadline.com:

The documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, about one of the world’s greatest pop stars, constitutes a kind of duet – between two filmmakers.

The film, making its world premiere in Berlin, comes from directors Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano, daughter of the subject of the film, the legendary Donna Summer.  “I was such a huge, massive fan of Donna’s and nothing made me feel the way she made me feel on the dance floor,” Williams, the Oscar-winning director of Music By Prudence, tells Deadine. “I thought, I want to make a music documentary.

I did The Apollo — which I guess is a music documentary — but I want to make one about an artist, and it has to be Donna Summer.” Sudano, meanwhile, also had been contemplating the idea of making a documentary about her mom, hoping to reveal dimensions of her mother’s talent that have been largely overlooked.  “I think people know her for songs, but I don’t think they really understand the full body of her work and just how much she contributed to that creatively as a songwriter and as a full-fledged, complex person and artist,” Sudano observes. “I went to my dad after my mom passed and I had my daughter, and I was like, ‘I think I want to do a doc on mom.’ And he was like, ‘Go for it.’” The film, playing in the Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale Special Gala section, sheds new light on Summer through an incredible archive of material, including a teenage Donna singing “The Age of Aquarius” in German, as part of a touring production of Hair.

In the film, Sudano also interviews her sisters, Amanda and Mimi, and her mom’s siblings and longtime friends and associates about key moments and formative experiences in Summer’s life. “Almost everyone in the documentary, this is the