Duffy, the Welsh singer-songwriter who had a large hit with “Mercy” in 2008 after which retreated from the limelight, is ready to inform her story in a brand new Disney+ documentary.
The announcement was made at Series Mania on Wednesday by Angela Jain, Disney+’s head of content material for EMEA, in a keynote tackle. In 2020, Duffy revealed in a social media publish that she had stepped away from music in 2011 after being kidnapped and raped.
Duffy “disappeared off the face of the earth and hasn’t really spoken about what happened in that time, other than about five or six years ago in a social media post,” Jain stated, calling the feature-length Hulu Original doc a “really powerful project.”
“She has entrusted us with her story, so we really have a huge responsibility to handle this with care and sensitivity, because she’s speaking about what happened to her for the first time,” Jain added. Production on the documentary, which will likely be directed by Gil Callan, is beginning quickly.
The doc “will be a retrospective film traversing Duffy’s life, from her upbringing in Wales, through to her meteoric rise to fame and her withdrawal from public life following her unfathomable experience,” a press launch reads. “The original documentary film will be driven by new, unprecedented access to Duffy, along with a rich and nostalgic archive, and interviews with family, friends, and close peers in the music industry.”
After the preliminary revelation, Duffy shared particulars of the kidnapping in a 3,000-word post on her web site. “It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country,” she wrote. The perpetrator, whose title she didn’t reveal, “made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me.”
Duffy continued, “It didn’t feel safe to go to the police. I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me. I could not risk being mishandled or it being all over the news during my danger. I really had to follow what instincts I had.”
She ultimately did inform the police, however stated within the publish that she has felt “petrified” ever since. Of a possible return to music, Duffy stated on the time: “I’m doing this to be freed, for all of me to be freed. What follows remains to be seen.”
The documentary is govt produced by Fernando De Jesus for Rare TV, who will produce the movie in partnership with govt producer Matthew Worthy for Stellify Media. The movie was commissioned out of the U.Okay. for Disney+ by Jain and Sean Doyle, VP, unscripted, EMEA. The fee follows a profitable pitch by means of a beforehand introduced improvement fund created by Disney+ U.Okay., in collaboration with Northern Ireland Screen, to assist help and develop the manufacturing sector in Northern Ireland.
