If you’ve hit your limit on impossibly attractive bakers falling in love and discovering the true meaning of Christmas, consider this your seasonal palate cleanser. Turn Hallmark and Lifetime off (for now) and switch on Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery. The star-studded doc premiered at TIFF this year, stoking the interest of music lovers around the world. Director Ally Pankiw’s documentary is spirited, clever, and quietly radical, examining the cultural earthquake that was Sarah McLachlan’s all-women touring festival and reminding us why it mattered then and how influential it was to the generations of women that came after.
At a time when the music industry insisted that listeners couldn’t handle two women back-to-back on commercial radio, McLachlan decided to buck the system. She went on tour with Paula Cole and proved the suits dead wrong. Lilith Fair debuted the next summer, its name taken from Jewish lore’s rebellious first woman, a mythic middle finger to the industry boys’ club it was about to upend. And upend it, it did! Lilith became the highest-grossing festival of 1997, powered not by crazy spectacle or pyrotechnics but by raw, varied talent like Jewel, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega, Pat Benatar, and more.
Pankiw threads performance footage, backstage candour, and ’90s media chaos into something that feels like a lovingly restored time capsule. The addition of talking head interviews with Brandi Carlile and Olivia Rodrigo underlines how deeply Lilith’s shockwaves still reverberate for young artists navigating an industry that wrongly pretends misogyny is a thing of the past. And Dan Levy (he’s everywhere since Schitt’s Creek) appears as both co-producer and a lifelong Lilith Fair fan, thanks to catching the festival as a kid, reminding us that the festival didn’t just shape artists, but audiences, too.
However, the film isn’t here solely to praise the feminist festival. One of its sharpest moves, and one that I personally didn’t expect it to tackle, was confronting Lilith Fair’s racial problem. The festival’s initial lineup skewed heavily white, a limitation the doc doesn’t sweep under the rug. Instead, it contextualizes how Tracy Chapman’s involvement (the sole woman of colour on the main stage) in the ’97 tour cracked open the door, eventually leading to Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, Des’ree, Deborah Cox, Monica, and Mya to follow suit in subsequent years. It’s a reminder that representation isn’t static; equity requires continual course-correction. In revisiting this, the film feels refreshingly honest. Celebratory, yes, but not naive.
Stylistically and spiritually, Lilith was the anti–Woodstock ’99. Where that notorious bro-fest became a pressure cooker of aggression, Lilith Fair offered a communal, collaborative energy that feels almost utopian in retrospect. Compared to the testosterone-soaked machismo that powered Lollapalooza and its mosh-heavy peers, Lilith’s emotional intelligence reads as revolutionary. Pankiw wisely emphasizes that the Fair wasn’t simply a festival with a different roster; it was a deliberately pointed reimagining of how a space could function. Respect was part of the design.
Building a Mystery charms because it remembers Lilith Fair as both a historical flashpoint and a deeply human endeavour. There’s joy in watching artists flourish in a space built for them, by them. And in a season dominated by predictable plot arcs and gingerbread-flavoured clichés, this doc stands out as a reminder that the ’90s weren’t just about flannel and angst. Sometimes they were about women taking the stage, taking the mic, and taking back the narrative. There’s no mystery here; this doc is well worth a watch.
If you’re in Canada, you can catch Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery on CBC Gem and on the CBC Docs YouTube channel. If you’re in the US, it’s streaming on Hulu.
