SUNDANCE ADDS GRATEFUL DEAD DOC

Amir Bar-Lev’s long-awaited documentary on the Grateful Dead, Long Strange Trip, will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Intended for release to commemorate the band’s 50th anniversary last year, the film is still in post-production.

The Park City, Utah-based festival released a description of the film as “The tale of The Grateful Dead is inspiring, complicated and downright messy. A tribe of contrarians, they made art out of open-ended chaos and inadvertently achieved success on their own terms. Never-before-seen footage and interviews offer this unprecedented and unvarnished look at the life of the Dead.”

The film was announced in 2014 with Martin Scorsese on board as an executive producer and drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s son Justin Kreutzmann as a producer. The festival did not provide a running time for the film though it has been rumored that it would be sold as a four-part miniseries.

Bar-Lev’s previous music film work includes directing and producing the Hurricane Sandy benefit concert film 12-12-12.

Sundance has been a key launchpad for music documentaries, among them the Oscar-winners 20 Feet From Stardom and Searching for Sugarman, What Happened Miss Simone? and the first part of The Eagles doc that aired on Showtime. Long Strange Trip joins Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana’s RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World, a film about the role of Native Americans in contemporary music history, as the only other music doc in the festival at this time.

The premiere precedes the next tour of Dead & Co., which starts May 27 in Las Vegas and runs through July 1 at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.