Singer-songwriter-musicianJanis Iancelebrates her 74thbirthday today.
Who would that be?
And I meditated on that question for a few days and the name Janis Ian came into my mind.
‘Janis Ian: Breaking Silence’Greenwich Entertainment
And thats how it started.
Watch on Deadline
She reached out to the artist through Ians website.
I left a message saying, Hi, my name is Varda Bar-Kar, she recounted.
Janis Ian and director Varda-Bar-Kar on March 28, 2025 in New York CityDimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Im a filmmaker and I would like to make a documentary about you.
But Ian and Bar-Kar kept talking, and eventually the project took form.
I turned over all of [my] archival stuff.
I had digitized everything from publicity photos to family photos.
As the film explores, Ian grew up on a farm in New Jersey.
She gravitated at a very young age to music and her father taught her to play piano.
Eventually, she became enamored of guitar, but her parents didnt have the means to buy her one.
There was never any money that I remember, Ian recalled.
To get a guitar was just unbelievable, to have my own instrument.
I was 13 and my mother walked in and saw me crying and asked what was wrong.
And I said, I know we cant afford it, but I really, really need a guitar.
He offered me the choice of changing that word Black to anything else and guaranteed me a hit.
And he was very serious.
For every triumph there has been a setback or challenge, seemingly.
Instead of feeling bitter about the embezzlement, she takes a philosophical perspective.
The way I look at it, I put both of his daughters through college, she said.
And he died, and I didnt.
The film explores Ians romantic relationships with men and women and her evolving sense of her sexuality.
Bar-Kar cast four actresses to play Ian at various stages of her life.
The filmmaker doesnt call these sequences recreations.
I call them mood shots because theyre so fragmented, Bar-Kar explained.
Its all really tightly mixed together.
Nina was biologically in a different space, and she was very difficult to be friends with.
OnJoplin: We just became friendly.
And we would troll [Greenwich Village] and buy sunglasses together.
And my Grammy dress [in 1968]…
I bought that with Janis at a little shop on the Upper East Side that was really cheap.
So thats where we shopped.
And she was very, very good to me.
I was like a mascot for people like her and Jimi [Hendrix].
They were all in their 20s.
To have somebody like Odetta take me under her wing meant that I was worthy.
If I think about it, I was really, really lucky.
And I said, Whos that and why?
And he said, Because Stella Adler is 83 and everyone should study with Stella Adler…
I was 33, she was 83.
I studied with her every class I could for the five remaining years that she taught.
I miss her every single day.
She gave me a language for what I felt about being an artist that I had never had before.
If I am articulate about being an artist, its because of Stella, not because of me.
The rights to her 2008 autobiography,Societys Child,recently reverted to Ian.
[Its] is beautifully written, Bar-Kar said at the Q&A.
So, keep an eye out for it.
Its a really, really great complement to the film.
Im still taking it in.
