Get your first look at the award-winning story of singer Jackie Shane. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) released the first trailer today for Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. The NFB/Banger Films co-production directed by Michael Mabbot and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee chronicles the life and music of Jackie Shane. The R&B singer broke ground on the Toronto music scene and airwaves during the 1960s as an out Black transwoman in the spotlight. Despite Shane’s popularity and captivating voice, she virtually disappeared from public life until shortly before her death in 2019.
The film tells Shane’s story in her own words by drawing upon telephone interviews and thoughts transcribed in her unpublished autobiography. The doc features a wealth of archival photos of Shane, while the amount of video footage of Shane is extremely limited—but the filmmakers pull off a tricky feat of making Shane an active presence in the doc as rotoscope animation brings her to life for visual materials.
Also featured in contemporary interviews are many of Jackie Shane’s relatives, who only came to know her story after she passed. The film sees them comb through her archives and discover the influential artist and aunt they never knew. But the film also gets perspectives voices who new Jackie, like writer Rob Bowman, and performers who encountered her in spirit like multidisciplinary artist Makayla Walker. This toe-tappingly great music doc offers an overdue appreciation of Shane’s music and legacy.
The film also includes a who’s who of executive producers, including actors Elliot Page and Nia Long, and rapper CJ Mac. Any Other Way premiered earlier this year at SXSW before winning the Special Jury Prize for Canadian documentary features at Hot Docs and ranking among the top ten audience favourites. The film opens in Canadian theatres this August. Read more about Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story in the cover story of our current issue.
