Director Ally Pankiw never got to go to a Lilith Fair, but in her doc Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, she takes us all back to the music festival that surprised everyone, including its founder.
“She was like Canada’s princess,” says director Ally Pankiw of Sarah McLachlan.
Having grown up in the Great North herself, Pankiw was too young to attend McLachlan’s Lilith Fair music festival in the late ’90s. But in her Hulu documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, she gets to explore what made the phenomenon so special and its impact today.
“I was very aware of all of those artists because I was a dancer. And so the whole soundtrack of my young adolescent dance career was earnest, lyrical, and contemporary solos, like Jewel and Sarah McLachlan and all these artists. It was the soundtrack to my childhood and teenage years.”
Through archival footage and interviews with artists and crew members, Pankiw drops us in 1997. As for which music to feature, that became “impossible to decide” but the film quality and ties to specific moments in the doc usually helped her prioritize one song over another.
Unfortunately, there’s no footage of the time Prince joined Sheryl Crow on stage.
“We’ve heard stories, too, of other male artists at the time being like, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to be doing Lollapalooza. I want to go play Lilith.’ And it was a very cool, covetable place to be. That was just not really demonstrated or talked about in pop culture at the time.”
I had a great conversation with Pankiw about her fascinating documentary, including her own personal quest to uplift underrepresented voices in film, whether social media would ruin something like Lilith Fair today, and the festival’s impact on artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. Listen or watch below!
