A new CBC documentary about Lilith Fair, the touring music festival organized by Sarah McLachlan that featured an all-female lineup, has been announced. Directed by Ally Pankiw, the documentary will feature new interviews with McLachlan, Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Olivia Rodrigo, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris, Jewel, Natalie Merchant, Mýa, and Brandi Carlile.
The film will serve as a deep dive into Lilith Fair, which ran from 1997 to 1999 and had a one-off revival in 2010, by utilizing 600 hours of never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with artists, festival organizers, and fans. It’s in part inspired by the 2019 Vanity Fair article “Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair” by Pitchfork contributors Jessica Hopper, Sasha Geffen, and Jenn Pelly.
“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,” Pankiw said 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.”
Lilith Fair is slated to premiere on CBC during their 2025-2026 season, and White House Pictures is currently shopping it around for international partnerships. The documentary is produced by Dan Levy’s Not a Real Production Company, Elevation Pictures, and Christina Piovesan, while White Horse Pictures’ Cassidy Hartmann, Nicholas Ferrall, and Nigel Sinclair, along with Jessica Hopper, Jeanne Elfant Festa, Noah Segal, Arthur Spector, Joshuah Bearman, Joshua Davis, Pankiw, Steve Cohen, Paula Froehle, and Wayne Isaak sharing executive producer credits.
