Christian Cloos (commissioning editor for ZDF) writes: I really liked the film. Donna as a phone ghost, out of necessity, worked well, almost like it was an intentional way of raising questions of identity. Her death must have been a horror for you. The film offers great archive material and good interviewees (the sister was fantastic, as were all the others). It is very carefully researched, tightly narrated, intelligent and neatly edited – it’s a joy. It’s a continually surprising journey, both in its content and form, through the seventies and eighties. The use of the photos is brilliant. They become like exhibits about pop history, and when you introduce other material, we accept the poor technical quality as texture. It’s great how respectful you were, for example in how you introduced all the musicians involved in the single cover. It would be great if this were the start of an ongoing collaboration between you and Arte on more films about music and culture and you could ma...

  German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (Christian Schröder) writes:: Fame is greedy. It devours people, skin and all. The documentary Donna Summer – Hot Stuff opens with scenes from a chat show in the 1980s. The host asks what the singer thinks of the cliches about her. ‘Disco diva?’ She just giggles: ‘Tss’. ‘Queen of sex?’ She sighs: ‘Urgh.’ Donna Summer rose to fame in the mid 1970s with her hits ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and ‘I Feel Love’, which feature her softly sung verses and sensual vocalizing over producer Giorgio Moroder’s futuristic Moog synthesizer beats. Fame followed her for the rest of her life. One critic from Time magazine reckoned that Summer simulated 22 orgasms on ‘Love To Love You’, while the record cover showed her in a nightdress. “I felt like a product,” said Summer later. “Like a bottle that someone had stuck a label on.” She did of course contribute to the product. One night, when the line ‘I love to love you’ came to her, she called Moroder. Directors Lucia Pa...