“One to One: John & Yoko”: in May the film in the room

After the projection that will take place exclusively in America In April 2025 in the IMAX circuit it will also arrive in Italian theaters from 15 to 21 May as a special event “One to One: John & Yoko”, The docufilm of the Oscar -winning director Kevin MacDonald, Previewed at the last Venice Film Festival. The film It traces the year and a half in which Lennon and Oono lived in the Greenwich Village in New York between 1971 and 1973.

It is the beginning of the 70s e John Lennon and Yoko Ono leave the United Kingdom to move to New York: I am The golden couple of counterculturetheir political and social commitment is incessant in those months, alongside characters such as Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin, but they are also looking for Kyoko, daughter Yoko, and are worried about FBI wiretaps.

In their small apartment, which was faithfully reproduced for the film, TV is the window on the world: The images of the political and social scene with the horrors of the war in Vietnam and the first cracks of the Watergate appear on the screen, alternating with carefree advertising jingle, as forced smiles that are not enough to hide the discontent of the people who protest.

Fascinated by an investigation into the children of the Willowbrook State School, John & Yoko organize the charity event “One to one benefit concert”: Two concertswith the participation of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, that the August 30, 1972 (afternoon and evening) at the Madison Square Garden in New York with the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band And that they will remain the only live Live of Lennon after the Beatles.

Lennon and Ono were inspired by organizing that event after a complaint by Geraldo Rivera, a lawyer, journalist and TV presenter, revealed the horrible and abuse conditions of the school.

The film unites live music, with the audio of One to one benefit concert remastered and produced by Sean Ono Lennonand intimacy of the two protagonists with unpublished home movies and numerous recordings of phone calls by John and Yoko with friends and collaborators, offering a unique perspective on a fundamental period in the life of one of the most iconic couples in the history of music.

Tells the director Kevin MacDonaldalready author of documentaries on Bob Marley and Whitney Houston

From the beginning I decided that I would not have gone to look for old men on their death beds to get an anecdote about John Lennon, who probably had already told (…) I thought: there is enough material here that we could simply let them speak for themselves, allowing the audience to make this part of the game.
This is a film about music, love, politics and immersion in 1972, a period that resembles in an unlikely way to the world we are experiencing. And more than anything else I am grateful to Sean Lennon and the Mercury Studios for entrusting me with the incredible one to one concert