Britney Spears’ conservatorship that has controlled her life and estate over the last 13 years has been under scrutiny in the court ever since The New York Times: Framing Britney Spears documentary premiered on FX and Hulu in February. Now Netflix is taking its own closer look at the pop superstar’s legal situation with a new doc called Britney vs. Spears.
On Tuesday (Sept. 21), Netflix unveiled an 18-second teaser for the Britney vs. Spears doc, which plays a snippet of a voicemail Spears left one of her attorneys in 2009, just one year after her father Jamie ordered the Los Angeles County Supreme Court to put her into an emergency temporary conservatorship that is still in place to this day. (Jamie filed a petition on Sept. 7 to end the conservatorship after her attorney Mathew Rosengart demanded his immediate resignation.)
“Hi, my name is Britney Spears, I called you earlier. I’m calling again because I just wanted to make sure that during the process of eliminating the conservatorship… ,” she says faintly in the fuzzy audio clip.
A full trailer for Britney vs. Spears will be released on Wednesday.
Erin Lee Carr, the daughter of late New York Times columnist David Carr, is the director of the new film, which has been in the works for more than a year, according to Variety. The two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker has focused on criminal justice in her latest projects, including Netflix’s four-part docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) and HBO’s two-part doc I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter (2019).
The Hulu/FX documentary Framing Britney Spears, which put a major spotlight on the #FreeBritney movement that’s inching closer and closer to its mission of getting Spears out of her longstanding conservatorship, was nominated at the 2021 Emmy Awards on Sunday night for outstanding picture editing for a nonfiction program and outstanding documentary or nonfiction special. Director Samantha Stark told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview after the Emmy noms were announced about how she framed the film after the “Toxic” singer wrote in a July 17 Instagram post that she “didn’t like the way the documentaries bring up humiliating moments from the past … I’m way past all that and have been for a long time.”
“While we were making the film, we talked a lot about re-traumatizing Britney and her family by showing these moments. Part of the reason it’s called Framing Britney Spears is there are these still-photo frames that were humiliating to her,” Stark said. “We thought it was really important to pull outside the frame because so many people had all these assumptions based on one frame, one still image that they saw. In the end, we felt like we had to put some of them in because we wanted people to have more context.”
Watch the Britney vs. Spears teaser below.
