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Amy Winehouse remains one of music’s most tragic figures. As a member of the morbid '27 club,' she was a star that burned hot and collapsed far too soon. We like to imagine that she just followed the trajectory of most pop stars – drowning themselves in drugs and alcohol carelessly. But Asif Kapadia’s controversial documentary Amy proves that there is much more to Winehouse than the paparazzi led us to believe during her last days.

Amy kicks off at a birthday party for a friend, with Winehouse belting out “Happy Birthday” at just 14. This sets the tone for Kapadia’s film, which is so much more intimate than most documentaries about music stars. Kapadia relies on footage shot by Winehouse’s best friends, images that the public has never seen before.

That makes the film feel a bit like prying into a subject’s private life, but there are aspects where Kapadia wisely holds back. He doesn’t include talking heads, only relying on the voices of Winehouse’s friends to tell her story. It’s an important move because it makes you focus on just the image of Winehouse. As Kapadia said in a Q&A session after the screening at the Savannah Film Festival, Winehouse had such a unique look that is impossible to look away from. Just her eyes were fascinating and looked like a window into a world we could never really understand.

The film also isn’t just about Winehouse. There’s a bigger story here, as Kapadia pulls down the curtain on the way the celebrity paparazzi machine works, especially in the U.K. Winehouse’s life was practically unbearable at the end, as she lived under flashing lightbulbs instead of the sun itself. We see her become the punch line of late night talk show hosts on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s sad. How could Jay Leno turn the sad life of a singer who was on his show into a joke? In early 2011, we laughed, but now we can see how wrong it was.

It’s not only our fault that Winehouse failed to find help. Kapadia doesn’t harp on it, but he touches on Mitch Winehouse’s own weird obsession with using his daughter to get attention on himself. Her friends also talk about the moments when they feel they failed her and her dangerous relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil.

In a strange surprise, it’s Tony Bennett who provides a poignant note at the end of the film. “Life teaches you really how to live it, if you live long enough,” the singer, who was Wineshouse’s idol, says. Winehouse needed a strong support system and instead of that, her friends were pushed out of the picture and the industry she was turned into destroyed her as a person.

Winehouse became an international superstar thanks to “Rehab,” a song that really was a plea for help. We dance to the song and it still comes on the radio to this day. But all we had to do was listen to those lyrics and we would have realized that she needed to be saved from something, even at that stage of her career.

Amy not only examines what led to her death, but also why she became the star she was. Winehouse’s lyrics pop up on screen to show that she wasn’t just a great singer, but a great songwriter as well. Kapadia doesn’t go into the drama surrounding her life after death because that would take away from his subject. True, the movie may make you feel uncomfortable with the incredibly private footage, but that’s what is needed to show that Winehouse wasn’t just the woman who sang “Rehab.”

Amy was screened at the Savannah Film Festival, presented by the Savannah College of Art & Design, as part of the Docs To Watch section.