Hop Film: One to One: John & Yoko

Kevin Macdonald's immersive documentary features mind-blowing music and restored footage of the iconic couple's only post-Beatles concert.

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 rollicking, dazzling performance from him and Yoko Ono. Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald's riveting documentary takes that legendary musical event and uses it as the starting point to explore 18 defining months in the lives of John and Yoko.

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 American television. The film uses a riotous mélange of American TV to conjure the era through what the two would have been seeing on the screen: the Vietnam War, The Price is Right, Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, Cronkite, The Waltons. As they experience a year of love and transformation in the US, John and Yoko begin to change their approach to protest, ultimately leading to the One to One concert.

Featuring music newly mixed by Sean Ono Lennon and premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, this immersive film offers a bold new take on a seminal time in the lives of two of history's most influential artists—a time of political upheaval that seems to rhyme with our own.

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