Autumn with Blues: Ella: Just One of Those Things

We have the pleasure of inviting you to a film screening within the 35th Autumn with Blues:

Ella: Just One of Those Things

October 9th, 2019, 6 PM
Forum cinema, 5 Legionowa Street
tickets: 18 PLN, tickets for all 4 movies: 60 PLN, available at the Forum cinema’s box office (5 Legionowa Street), BCC/LZC’ box office (19 Warszawska Street) and on bilety.bok.bialystok.pl

“Ella Fitzgerald was probably the perfect jazz singer. She could handle melodies of jazz standards extraordinarily, but she had as much groove as any instrumentalist. She could scat with the precision of the best wind instrumentalists, with groove and inventiveness.” (Jonny King, What Jazz Is, Like, 2002)

Two jazz films represent the more traditional music films of MSFF and introduce two legends of the jazz field: iconic record label Blue Note and “The First Lady of Jazz”, Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996). In Just One of Those Things Leslie Woodhead, an awarded documentarist known especially for his Srebrenica-film A Cry from the Grave (1999), lively but chronologically follows the life and career of “the world’s loneliest woman” (Oscar Peterson), a 16-year old talent found from Apollo-theatre’s talent show in Harlem, New York.

Though the conception of Ella as an unpolitical and silent feel-good artist may be somewhat true, it becomes clear in this impressive documentary that she also went through tough times in her youth and in the rare records of her interviews she speaks out against racism. Ella Fitzgerald’s private life also suffered plenty from her will to be, first and foremost, a remarkable singer who would give the audience her everything.

35. Autumn with Blues