HBO premiered Beyoncé’s Lemonade film in 2016.
Lemonade is both a musical film and the visual companion to Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, also titled Lemonade. HBO premiered the film on April 23, 2016, presenting it as a major television event before the visual album became widely available through other formats.
The approximately 65-minute work combines music, poetry, documentary-style footage, and experimental cinema. It is divided into 11 named chapters, including “Intuition,” “Anger,” “Forgiveness,” “Hope,” and “Redemption.” Beyoncé served as a director and executive producer, working with several other filmmakers.
The film’s collaborators included British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, whose writing appears throughout the project. Its subjects include betrayal, healing, Black womanhood, family history, and cultural memory. The HBO premiere is sometimes confused with its same-day releases on CD/DVD, Tidal, and the iTunes Store, but HBO was the television network that premiered it.