Premiering in Berlinale Competition, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a ravishing black-and-white elegy that turns the pianist’s creative paralysis into a tender, devastating meditation on addiction, grief and love — and the clear standout of my festival.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans is the latest feature from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Grant Gee, written by Irish screenwriter Mark O’Halloran and adapted from Owen Martell’s novel Intermission. Premiering in the Competition section at Berlinale 2026, the film deservedly earned Gee the Best Director prize and is already generating significant Oscar buzz.
While this film continues Gee’s longstanding engagement with musician-focused subjects — following movies such as Meeting People Is Easy (1998) and Joy Division (2007) — this marks his first narrative feature. Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie stars as legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans, supported by an exceptional ensemble of Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman as his parents, Barry Ward as his brother, and — my standout favourite — Valene Kane as his lover, Eilleen.
Shot in striking, high-contrast black and white by cinematographer Piers McGrail, the film centres on a period of emotional paralysis in Evans’s life, following the death of his close friend and bassist Scott LaFaro. It captures a moment of ‘intermission’, in which Evans steps back from music, buckling under the strain that fame, addiction, grief and talent have placed on his relationships with his family, his lovers and most significantly, with himself.
From its opening moments in a New York jazz club in 1961, the film establishes itself as much as a jazz composition as a work of cinema. The sensuality, intensity and intimacy of Evans’s musicianship — and the transcendent, mystical power of music itself — pulse through every scene and out into the cinema seats.
We follow Evans as he drifts between his brother’s home, his parents’ Florida retirement villa, and his own New York apartment, all the while unable to play, unable to connect, and trying to resist using heroin — alongside his partner Ellaine. The narrative unfolds in spare, unresolved movements — a sequence of jazz phrases, perhaps, more than a traditional plot — punctuated by brief colour flash-forwards to later deaths, including Evans’s own.
This was, by far and away, my favourite film at this year’s Berlinale — and even in February, it already feels like it will be difficult to surpass as my film of the year. Granted, this was essentially my dream of a movie: a music biopic, Irish production, black-and-white cinematography, jazz piano, and Bill Evans himself – this truly had my name written all over it – but even then, it still blew away my unreasonably high expectations out of the water.
The cinematography is unbelievably beautiful — sharp and elegant, stylistically perfect for the material at hand. The script exemplifies the idea that less is more: dialogue is sparse, but every word carries weight. With Gee’s impeccable direction and the utterly devastating performances by each and every one of the cast, this movie was nothing short of a marvel.
Whilst this is a movie about a musician – and an incredible musician at that – the film speaks more broadly to some of the most fundamentally human struggles that, at certain points and to varying extents, we all come to face; addiction and heartbreak, the weight of family expectations and the existential pressures of fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams. What happens to your relationship when you cannot have a child? Where do you go when you don’t know where to turn? How do you deal with the loss of a friend, the alcoholism of a parent, the breakdown of your lover?
Addiction is a particularly prescient theme in the movie. As Gee noted in the press conference, Bill Evans is set in a period before addiction was openly discussed in the ways we would recognise today. The film captures with heartbreaking restraint the ubiquity, mundanity, the silence and the attractions of addiction in its various and manifest forms.
Bill Evans’s power comes from the tenderness and complexity with which it treats each character – which, for me, was particularly personified by Valene Kane’s shatteringly beautiful portrayal of Eilleen. Her performance alone left me in tears that lasted all the way through the credits.
I’m listening to Bill Evans as I write this, as I have most days since watching the film, and I suspect I will be for a long time to come. I can only feel grateful to Gee, the cast and the crew for bringing these lives, relationships and this utterly, fundamentally, devastatingly human story to our screens.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
