jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons & Chike Ozah's three part documentary about Kanye West, is premiering this month at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (which is going virtual due to the Omicron variant). General audiences won't have to wait long after that to see it after that, though, as it hits Netflix over three weeks starting February 16, and Rolling Stone reports that it'll also screen a week ahead of that theaters nationwide, on February 10. They've just shared a teaser trailer for it which you can watch below.
Simmons and Ozah made the documentary from hundreds of hours of fly-on-the-wall footage filmed over the last two decades and jeen-yus promises to be "a sweeping portrait of one of pop culture’s most controversial figures." You can read the full Sundance synopsis below.
Kanye is rumored to be one of the Coachella 2022 headliners.
One fateful night at Jermaine Dupri’s birthday party in 1998, Coodie, a Chicago public access TV host, first interviewed 21-year-old up-and-coming hip-hop producer Kanye West. Inspired by the film Hoop Dreams, Coodie started to document West’s life to see how far his dreams would take him. When West moved to New York City to land a record deal, Coodie followed with camera in hand. He recorded West for years, from the hustle of his budding producer days through his rise to global icon. You think you know Kanye West, but you really don’t.
You can’t manufacture a project like jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy; it takes decades of vision, commitment, prayers, and perspective to produce. It seems providential that Coodie & Chike should be the ones to make the definitive film about West’s career thus far, as they were the filmmakers who introduced him to the masses with their documentary music video for “Through the Wire.” This epic three-film documentary features hours of fly-on-the-wall footage and paints a sweeping portrait of one of pop culture’s most controversial figures.