‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Documentary to Premiere at The 78th Venice Film Festival – 2021 – La Biennale di Venezia

‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ will receive its world premiere at The 78th Venice Film Festival in September 2021. La Biennale di Venezia

Becoming Led Zeppelin, directed by Bernard MacMahon (American Epic), and co-written and produced by Allison McGourty, with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and Robert Plant as themselves, will feature in the out-of-competition section at the 78th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia, directed by Alberto Barbera (September 1—11, 2021).

Becoming Led Zeppelin is a documentary that reveals the individual journeys of the four members of the band, as they move through the music scene of the 1960s, playing small clubs throughout Britain and performing some of the biggest hits of the era, until their meeting in the summer of 1968 for a rehearsal that changes their lives forever. Their four journeys merge into one as they set out to conquer America on a rollercoaster ride that culminates in 1970 when they become the number one band in the world. Before the stairway and the dragon, before the gold and the girls, there were simply four men and their love of music.

Bernard MacMahon says: “With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it. I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin’ In The Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets, and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.”