20 music documentaries you must watch if you liked A Star is Born

Matangi/Maya/MIA

To end, let’s check out a documentary that is wildly different than anything boy band related. In 2018, M.I.A. was the subject of a biographical documentary by Steve Loveridge. The film follows 22 years in the English performer’s life, including her rise to fame, her political activism, and controversies surrounding her music.

The film utilized never-before-scene footage spanning decades to offer an intimate portrait of M.I.A., born Mathangi Arulpragasam. Besides talking about her music, like her hit song “Paper Planes,” it also focused on her political activism surrounding the Sri Lankan Civil War. She was born in England, but her family moved to Jaffna, Sri Lanka, when she was six months old, which is where her father started the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, a militant group. Her family went into hiding during this time and had little contact with her father.

Matangi/Maya/MIA premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was in select theatres in the UK and the US. It took home the World Cinema Documentary Jury Award at Sundance and has received generally favorable reviews from critics. M.I.A. herself wasn’t too pleased, though, about the fact that the film didn’t focus enough on her music, telling Billboard, “Eventually, if you squash all the music together from the film, it makes for about four minutes. I didn’t know that my music wouldn’t really be a part of this. I find that to be a little hard, because that is my life.”

What music documentary will you be watching first? Let us know in the comments!