Karen Oconnor: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Magnolia Pictures has acquired worldwide rights to Joan Baez I Am A Noise, the feature documentary about the iconic folk singer directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Laurie Anderson will lead a post-screening conversation with legendary singer Joan Baez and director Karen O’Connor after a screening of the new documentary, “Joan Baez I Am a Noise” at the Hamptons International Film Festival on July 22. (Read Variety‘s review of the film here.) The 2023 edition of the documentary showcase festival will conclude with a presentation of the documentary, which was produced by O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle on Saturday, July 22, at 7 p.m. at the Regal UA East Hampton Cinema. Following the film, Baez and O’Connor will join the musician and artist Laurie Anderson for an intimate conversation.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent In “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” which is premiering on Feb. 17 at the Berlin Film Festival, the folk icon with a supple soprano voice and a long history of activism, takes a disarmingly candid look on her life as she faces the end of her 60-year musical career. The immersive doc is co-directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle. They interweave Baez’s 2018 Fare Thee Well final concert tour with her early years, her rise to fame, struggles with drugs that ensued, and a darker psychological thread involving a form of child abuse on the part of Baez’s father. A surprising level of intimacy is reached thanks to a wealth of material obtained from Baez’s meticulously preserved personal archives comprising home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings of voice letters to her family. Some, while Baez was on tour in England in 1965 with Bob Dylan whom, she confesses in the doc, “broke my heart.”

From the time Joan Baez gave her first performances as a teenager in the late 1950s, she possessed a remarkable soprano voice with distinctive vibrato that paired magically with acoustic guitar. Baez also displayed an exceptional stage presence — confident, natural and serene.

Alongside the heartbreaking picture of Des from the summer, she penned: "Essential travel to the Drive-Thru for my Happy Meal."Kristina, a singer who performs under the name Tarantina, also shared a snap of herself cuddling up to her dad on the sofa from before lockdown began earlier this year.She shared the snaps as the ‘how it started/how it’s going’ meme with a TV Times cover from October 1987, where her dad held her as a newborn.Des shared his daughter Kristina with his third wife, Jay Rufer.The Countdown icon also had a daughter Karen O'Connor with his first wife Phyllis Gill and daughters Tracy and Samantha with Gillian Vaughan.Des most recently had a son Adam at the age of 72 with his partner Jodie Brooke Wilson, who he married in