A new documentary about one of the most famous biracial couples of the 20th century is premiering next month.
“One To One: John & Yoko” looks at the lives of former Beatle John Lennon and Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) Yoko Ono in New York City, U.S.A.’s Greenwich Village in the early 1970s.
YOKO ONO
Ono spent her formative years between Japan and the United States. Her father, a Christian, was a banker who was posted to work overseas in San Francisco, Calif., two weeks before she was born. The rest of the family followed soon after, and Ono and her father finally met face-to-face when she was 2 years old.
The Ono family didn’t stay in the United States long, though, as they moved back to Tokyo in 1937. Ono enrolled at the elite and exclusive Gakushuin School in Tokyo where she studied for three years.
In 1940, the Ono family moved briefly back across the ocean to New York City until the Japanese military’s bombing of Pearl Harbor forced her father to be transferred to Hanoi, Vietnam, where he became a prisoner of war.
The rest of the family returned to Japan, and Ono enrolled in the highly prestigious Christian Keimei Gakuen primary school. She stayed in Japan through the rest of World War II, where she experienced firsthand the U.S. attacks on Japan.
At the age of 18, Ono and her parents moved back to the United States and settled in Scarsdale, New York. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College for a few semesters until she left to elope with her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi in Japan. After divorcing Ichiyanagi in 1960, she moved back to New York and subsequently began a relationship with Lennon.
THE DOCUMENTARY
The documentary, directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald, shows never-before-seen material and newly restored footage of Lennon and Ono’s only full-length concert. It also features music newly remixed and produced by Sean Ono Lennon.
On August 30, 1972, in New York City, John Lennon played his only full-length show after leaving The Beatles, the “One to One” benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, a performance — described by critics as “rollicking” and “dazzling” — from him and Ono.
Macdonald’s documentary takes that legendary musical event and uses it as the starting point to explore 18 defining months in the lives of Lennon and Ono.
By 1971, the couple was newly arrived in the United States — living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and watching a huge amount of U.S. television. The film uses a mélange of U.S. TV to conjure the era through what the two would have been seeing on the screen, including the Vietnam War, the game show “The Price is Right,” then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the TV show “The Waltons.”
As they experience a year of love and transformation in the U.S., Lennon and Ono begin to change their approach to protest — ultimately leading to the “One to One” concert, which was inspired by a Geraldo Rivera exposé they watched on TV.
Filmed in a meticulously faithful reproduction of the New York apartment the duo shared, Macdonald’s “One to One: John & Yoko” offers a new take on a seminal time in the lives of two of history’s most influential artists.
The film premieres exclusively in IMAX on April 9 in the U.K. and April 11 in the United States, and on wider release from April 11 in the U.K. and April 18 in the U.S., with wider distribution the following month in Europe.
Check out the trailer below.
