Magnolia Pictures has set a theatrical and VOD May 27 release date for the upcoming documentary feature "Presenting Princess Shaw," which looks like a crowd-pleaser about how one woman gets closer to achieving a dream thanks to today’s inter-connected world.
In short, New Orleans based amateur singer Princess Shaw uploads videos of herself singing to YouTube. Thousands of miles away, Israeli director Ido Haar, claiming to be making a documentary about YouTube singers, actually had other plans. He wanted to see if he could capture how a video goes viral. Fellow YouTube artist from Israel named Kutiman had found one of Princess Shaw’s videos and became so captivated by her singing, as well as her original song, which was "filled with longing and abstractly based on a hard life of abuse and an on-off relationship with an ex-girlfriend." So Kutiman, a composer, created the instrumental track (a combination of the work of other artists he found on YouTube) upon which he laid Princess Shaw’s singing, and uploaded it to YouTube, and, well, you can probably guess how this story ends.
Director Ido Haar captures it all in the feature documentary "Presenting Princess Shaw," which screened at the SXSW Film Festival this month, as well as the Miami Film Festival.
By the way, Kutiman has done this for other artists, compiling the work together in one YouTube album titled "Thru You Too."
Trailer below followed by the video Kutiman created for Princess Shaw, titled "Give It Up," which did go viral in 2014, generating over 2.4 million views (on YouTube alone):
