A rarely seen director’s cut of Beyoncé’s Lemonade film will be screened in Australia.
The alternate version of the groundbreaking visual album, directed by Kahlil Joseph, is set to screen at ACMI in Melbourne’s Federation Square, giving audiences a rare opportunity to see footage that has mostly been reserved for museum exhibitions since the project’s original 2016 release.
Joseph’s cut of Lemonade is advertised by ACMI with a 43 minute runtime, noticeably shorter than the 65 minute version that was ultimately released by Beyoncé in 2016. Exactly how much differs between the two films remains unclear, but accounts over the years have pointed to a more intimate and mournful interpretation of the material.
In curator’s notes shared by ACMI, Joseph said the film arrived during “a moment of profound rupture and arrival” in his life after “the death of my brother, Noah Davis, and the birth of my first child.” He wrote that “grief and joy existed simultaneously, shaping how I approached image, sound, and narrative.”
Joseph also recalled an immediate connection with Beyoncé when work on the project began.
“When Beyoncé reached out, she, too, was moving through a period of loss,” he said. “There was an immediate alignment, a shared emotional register that informed the work from its inception.”
A description of Joseph’s version previously appeared in a 2017 profile published by The New Yorker, which noted it “addresses grief and sisterhood.”
The magazine noted that “there are no big production numbers” and “no violence against the male oppressor.”
The piece compared Joseph’s footage with the finished “Hold Up” sequence directed by Jonas Äkerlund, where Beyoncé smashes car windows with a baseball bat. In Joseph’s cut, Beyoncé is crouched “in a ruined fort, bent low by sadness.”
The article also described scenes of women gathering to prepare a feast while “natural sounds — crickets, wind” play underneath, with the footage reportedly being “spooky, seductive, and profound.”
According to the profile, Beyoncé later “chose to go in another direction” and brought in additional directors to reshape the film with “a cleaner narrative line, and a dose of revenge.”
While some of Joseph’s work remained in the final version of Lemonade, the magazine reported that Beyoncé has only permitted Joseph’s cut to be screened in museum settings.
Kahlil Joseph’s cut of Lemonade screens at the ACMI on June 4 and June 22.
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