Magnolia Pictures has released the trailer for One to One: John & Yoko, the documentary from Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald that has been on the festival circuit since bowing at last year’s Venice Film Festival. It is set to premiere exclusively on Imax screens April 11 before a wide release the next week.
The feature-length documentary is shot through with archival footage including previously unseen home movies and clips from the famed August 1972 “One to One” benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, featuring John Lennon backed by guest musicians and collaborators alongside his and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band and backing band Elephant’s Memory.
The free show would be Lennon’s only full-length concert after leaving the Beatles as he and Ono sought to reinvigorate young people and the activist movement — “Speak to them, sing to them, do anything to get them alive again,” Lennon says in the trailer — in the face of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon in the White House.
Directed by Macdonald (One Day in September) and co-directed and edited by Sam Rice-Edwards, the doc was shot in a reproduction of tiny Greenwich Village apartment Lennon and Ono shared when they moved to the U.S. in 1971. One cool moment in the trailer: When asked how he wished the couple to be remembered, he replied with the seemingly double-meaning “Just as two lovers.”
The film, a Plan B/KM Films & Mercury Studios production, is produced by Peter Worsley, Macdonald and Alice Webb and executive produced by Marc Robinson, David Joseph, Steve Condie, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Sean Ono Lennon, who also served as music producer.
Check out the trailer above.
