Sarah McLachlan’s late ’90s all-female touring festival Lilith Fair is the subject of a new feature-length documentary set to premiere on Hulu and Disney+ on Sunday, September 21st.
Titled Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, the authorized film is inspired by the 2019 Vanity Fair article Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair, written by Jessica Hopper with former Consequence editor Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly. The film is directed by Ally Pankiw and pulls from more than 600 hours of archival footage, interviews, and stories from fans, festival organizers, and artists who played Lilith Fair.
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The documentary includes interviews with McLachlan herself, Sheryl Crow, Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlile, Natalie Merchant, Mýa, Jewel, the Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris, and Olivia Rodrigo. The latter will presumably be talking about the festival’s influence since she wasn’t even born yet when Lilith Fair was founded.
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“Lilith Fair exemplifies the ‘cool older sister’ of the music industry, who already knows the joys and nightmares of being a woman and tries to make the path a little bit easier for future generations,” said Pankiw in a statement. “I want to give a deeper understanding of the festival to the young female, nonbinary and queer musicians, and music fans who picked up a guitar or tickets to a concert for the first time because Lilith showed them how.”
The Lilith Fair tour was inspired by the sexism McLachlan encountered in the male-dominated music industry, with the first date taking place on July 5th, 1997 at The Gorge in George, Washington. In addition to many of the artists interviewed for the documentary, the main stage featured performances from Lisa Loeb, Fiona Apple, and Tracy Chapman.
It returned for two more summers in 1998 and 1999, helping to spotlight rising artists like Missy Elliott, The Chicks, Nelly Furtado, and Christina Aguilera. Lilith Fair was later revived in 2010, but unfortunately fell apart due to poor ticket sales.
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery will also air on Canada’s CBC beginning September 17th.
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