Sobey Road Entertainment is proud to support Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery—a vibrant, soul-stirring documentary that reclaims the untold story of one of music’s most transformative and defiant festivals.
Directed by Ally Pankiw (Black Mirror, I Used to Be Funny), the film chronicles the rise of Lilith Fair, the all-female touring music festival launched in the late 1990s by singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan and her team. In an era where women were routinely excluded from radio airplay and festival lineups, Lilith Fair broke every rule—and changed the music industry forever.
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery captures that cultural moment with rare intimacy and scope. Drawing from over 600 hours of never-before-seen archival footage, the film features new interviews with original Lilith artists—including Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Jewel, Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris—and the next generation of torchbearers, including Brandi Carlile and Olivia Rodrigo.
But the film does more than celebrate a landmark—it interrogates the forces that tried to undermine it. As it revisits the festival’s radical origin, it also examines its backlash, its lasting influence, and what it means today in a cultural landscape still grappling with equity, representation, and creative freedom.
Directed with radical empathy and electric energy, the documentary is a testament to the power of collective resistance and joy. It’s produced by a powerhouse team including Dan Levy, Christina Piovesan, and the award-winning team at White Horse Pictures, in association with Epic Magazine, Elevation Pictures, and Sobey Road Entertainment.“Lilith wasn’t just a festival,” McLachlan says in the film. “It was a community—a movement. A place where women lifted each other up and proved an entire industry wrong.”
Sobey Road is honored to help bring this story to life—a story of vision, courage, and the enduring power of women using their voices to change the world.
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and will stream globally on Hulu and Disney+. Stay tuned for more updates.
by
Andrew Trapani
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