All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story

Director: Christian Blackwood

1982 / 87min / Digital

Selected by Julie Dash

A revealing documentary portrait of Eartha Kitt, the sultry chanteuse and actress that Orson Welles once called “the most exciting woman in the world,” All by Myself opens with a glamorous Kitt performing at President Reagan’s Inaugural Ball (she sings “I Want to Be Evil”), then proceeds to reveal the public and private sides of its subject through a combination of live concert footage and candid interviews from her isolated home/refuge, in which she discusses the traumas of her girlhood in the deep South and her blacklisting following criticism of the American presence in Vietnam—all with style, humor, and a sense of unbreakable purpose.