Firefly, the first feature documentary on guitarist Emily Remler, opens its Kickstarter

The first feature-length documentary about the jazz guitarist Emily Remler goes to Kickstarter on Friday 25 September. It is called Firefly, and it is directed by Al Naffah, a London-based filmmaker and producer who has played jazz piano for more than twenty years and founded Aletheian Pictures to make character-driven films about artists.

Remler is the sort of musician a film like this exists to correct the record on. She emerged in the late 1970s, graduated from Berklee College of Music, and built an international career in a field that was then almost entirely male. She recorded seven studio albums in her lifetime and played with many of the leading musicians of her era. She died in 1990, aged 32.

The idea came to Naffah in 2015, after he saw Asif Kapadia's Amy. He noticed the parallels between Amy Winehouse and Remler, two Jewish women who were exceptional jazz artists and who both lost their lives to addiction, and concluded that a film in which Remler told her own story would carry more weight than one told about her.

His account of what made her playing distinctive is specific rather than reverent. She had absorbed the language of bebop, Wes Montgomery in particular, without ever sounding like an imitation of it. Naffah describes playing that was fluid, rhythmically assured and harmonically sophisticated, and at the same time warm, playful and direct, with a conversational quality to the phrasing. Speed was available to her, he says, but it was never the point.

He argues for her relevance now on two grounds. Female instrumentalists remain underrepresented in jazz, and her insistence on being judged as a musician rather than as a woman still resonates with the people he interviewed. Beyond that, audiences are reassessing artists who were overlooked in their own lifetimes, and young players keep finding her records and studying them.

The film is built on her own words and performances. The production has located extensive archival interviews and concert footage from across her career, including material held by Berklee College of Music and Musicians Institute that has not been seen before. That sits alongside interviews with close friends, former partners, teachers and musicians who knew or played with her, plus television archives, photographs and personal documents.

Most of the work is already done, which changes what the campaign is for. Filming is largely complete and there is a feature-length rough cut running about 75 minutes, so the structure and the emotional shape of the film are settled. What remains is refining the edit, clearing rights, and professional post-production: colour grading, sound editing and mixing, mastering and delivery.

The money reflects that. Naffah estimates up to $85,000 to finish, with an initial Kickstarter target of roughly 20,000 pounds and the rest sought through grants, private donations, sponsorship and a fiscally sponsored fundraising campaign in the United States. The largest expenses are archival and music licensing, and that is also why there is no trailer yet: the licences have to be cleared before any of the footage can be shown publicly.

If it all holds together, the film is finished in 2027, the year Remler would have turned 70, and goes out through an international festival campaign with special screenings alongside Berklee and Musicians Institute. Our earlier note said no funding target or completion date had been reported; both are in the interview, and both are above. The rest of our jazz coverage sits on the jazz hub.