“I Am: Celine Dion,” newly released for viewing on Prime Video, is so focused on what the singer has been through in more than a decade and a half of struggling with Stiff Person Disease that it’s hard to believe that director Irene Taylor didn’t even know Dion was ill when she signed on to the project. All she Taylor really knew, when she agreed to direct the film about a year of discussions, was that Dion seemed like a star who really, really had something to get off her chest… with little anticipation of just what kind of floodgates would open.
The day after the film premiered in New York last week, Taylor spoke with PvNew about what she learned about what Dion has been struggling, and when — including not just the chronic illness itself, but the singer’s surprising guilty conscience in not having leveled with fans at every step of the way, even when she was in the dark herself. Taylor also shared her thoughts about how comfortable the usually glamorous Dion was in being filmed without makeup from the outset — which little compares to the humility she showed in letting herself be portrayed undergoing a seizure, in a truly shocking scene. (If you want to avoid documentary spoilers altogether, save this reading for after a viewing of Taylor’s powerful and perceptive film.)
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