I Called Him Morgan

[projekktor id=’27631′]

I Called Him Morgan is a documentary from Swedish director Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler). The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival before screening at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York film festivals.

On a snowy night in February 1972, celebrated jazz musician Lee Morgan was shot dead by his wife Helen during a gig at a club in New York City. The murder sent shockwaves through the jazz community, and the memory of the event still haunts those who knew the Morgans. This feature documentary by Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin is a love letter to two unique personalities and the music that brought them together. A film about love, jazz and America.

“When I started working on the film, Helen and the complexity of their relationship was an aspect of Lee’s story that I didn’t know,” explains Collin. “Until then, she had just been the woman who shot and killed Lee. I had no idea about the rest of the story. Once I started meeting the people who knew Lee, many of them wanted to rather immediately talk about the last years and about Helen and her importance in his life, often in a very loving way. The grief was still there—the grief of losing not just one of their best friends, but two of them and the fact that one of them shot the other. The closer I got to Lee’s story it became apparent that a film about Lee also had to be about Helen.”

I Called Him Morgan is rated PG.