Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Grant Gee spent twenty-five years making some of the best music documentaries in Britain — Meeting People Is Easy with Radiohead, Joy Division, Patience (After Sebald) — and won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlinale with his first dramatic feature. It is an Irish-British production about ten days in the life of an American jazz pianist, which tells you something about how the money for this kind of film now moves.

Anders Danielsen Lie plays Bill Evans in June 1961, at the moment the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian had become the thing every pianist since has had to answer to. The Village Vanguard residency that produced Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby is recorded; LaFaro dies on the road shortly afterwards. Gee's documentary instincts show in how the music is handled — performances are given room rather than cut into montage — and Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf appear as Evans's parents.

The jury's decision to give Gee the directing prize rather than the film a larger award reads as precise: this is a picture whose achievement is formal, a music film that trusts silence, and one of the few jazz biopics that does not treat the playing as illustration.