‘Lilith Fair’ Documentary Features Sarah McLachlan, Brandi Carlile, Bonnie Raitt & More

In 1997, Sarah McLachlan launched and headlined the Lilith Fair tour with other female solo artists and women-fronted bands. The trek’s highly successful three-year heyday will be the focus of a new documentary, simply titled Lilith Fair, from director Ally Pankiw and the CBC.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Lilith Fair will feature interviews with McLachlan, Brandi Carlile, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls, Jewel, Olivia Rodrigo, Mýa and Emmylou Harris. The film will be co-produced by Elevation Pictures and Dan Levy’s Not a Real Production Company.

Pankiw will pull from over 600 hours of never-before-seen archival footage, interviews and discussions with fans, organizers and musicians who played Lilith Fair. The movie has the full support of McLachlan.

“Lilith Fair exemplifies the ‘cool older sister’ of the music industry, who already knows the joys and nightmares of being a woman and tries to make the path a little bit easier for future generations. I want to give a deeper understanding of the festival to the young female, nonbinary and queer musicians and music fans who picked up a guitar or tickets to a concert for the first time because Lilith showed them how,” Ally Pankiw said in a statement via The Hollywood Reporter.

“What Sarah built with that festival changed so much for so many people. And while it is now seen as an odds-defying success story, it was an uphill battle every step of the way. And there is a lot to be learned from that story. I’m thrilled to join Sarah on this adventure and am excited for everyone to understand just how revolutionary Lilith Fair really was,” added Dan Levy.

Lilith Fair will premiere on CBC during the 2025-26 season. The tour made over 130 stops across North America between 1997 and 1999. $10 million of the tour’s +$52-million gross was contributed to women’s charities. Read Vanity Fair’s oral history of Lilith Fair, the article that inspired the film.