Asif Kapadia's Amy is in the tradition of Direct Cinema — the American documentary movement that planted cameras in front of real people and let reality unfold. D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, which follows Bob Dylan on tour in 1965, invented the music documentary grammar that Amy inherits. The Maysles Brothers showed that observation without intervention could produce something more devastating than any scripted drama. Don't Look Back is on Criterion Channel.
Films That Influenced Amy
