George Michael: The Faith Tour screens the Paris shows shot on 35mm and never released

Fourteen cameras loaded with motion-picture film were trained on George Michael for two nights at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, at the moment Faith had turned the former Wham! singer into a solo superstar. Then the reels went quiet. No concert film followed, no live album, no official video. George Michael: The Faith Tour, the restored film built from that footage, opened this week in British, Irish and several European cinemas, almost four decades after the shows it records.

For a Paris critic the venue is half the story: Bercy, the concrete arena in the east of the city that now trades as the Accor Arena, was barely four years old when Michael played it. The other half is the edit. A film assembled from two nights and fourteen angles is never the record of one concert. It is an argument about a concert, and here the argument has been made by the people who built Michael’s image in the first place, the music-video director Andy Morahan and the longtime collaborator David Austin. The film sets out to show a pop star at full power. It cannot show why he never mounted a show like it again.

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One name in the credits, one image on the poster

The credits list a single performer, George Michael, in archive footage, and the campaign has chosen its image to match. The key art at the top of this page shows him crouched mid-song, microphone raised, a black leather jacket slipping off one shoulder over a white vest, a cross hanging from one ear, the arena behind him reduced to a dark field of pinpoint lights. That is the Faith persona in a single frame, stubble, leather and torn denim, and the release sells it without irony. The irony belongs to the man. A long Rolling Stone essay on the tour, published in the magazine’s Italian edition, argues that this was the only time Michael fully identified with the role of sexy pop idol on stage, and the last.

Morahan’s credits explain the picture. He directed the videos for Faith, Careless Whisper and Last Christmas, so he helped invent the visual vocabulary this film now restores. Austin directed George Michael Freedom Uncut and George Michael at the Palais Garnier, Paris. The great concert films have authors: Jonathan Demme built Stop Making Sense as one escalating staging, Prince moved Sign o’ the Times onto a soundstage to control it, D.A. Pennebaker filmed Bowie retiring Ziggy Stardust in front of the crowd. The Faith Tour belongs to a newer category, the posthumous archive cut, where authorship is split between the camera crews of one Paris spring and an editing room working decades later, with Ben Wainwright-Pearce as editor.

What the setlist argued

The concerts made a case of their own, and the film inherits it. The Faith Tour ran to 109 shows across 16 countries, with choreography by Paula Abdul, and it was Michael’s first tour without Wham!. Yet the set did not disown the duo. In Rolling Stone’s account it opened on I Want Your Sex and Hard Day, then swung straight into Everything She Wants and I’m Your Man, and it made room for the soul records he loved: Stevie Wonder’s Love’s in Need of Love Today, LaBelle’s Lady Marmalade, Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music. One Wham! hit he would not sing at all, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. The 18-track live album released alongside the film keeps those covers next to Father Figure, One More Try, Monkey, A Different Corner and Careless Whisper, all drawn from the Paris shows recorded on 30 and 31 May 1988.

What a restoration cannot settle

None of this guarantees a film. One of the first reviews, from the French site AVCesar after a preview screening in late October, was candid. It found the staging minimal by today’s standards, the image and sound short on depth, the band left in shadow so that only the singer is lit, and Abdul’s choreography badly dated, before conceding that the last part of the concert finally carries the viewer along. There is a structural limit as well. This is an estate production, made by George Michael Entertainment with Globe Originals and Mercury Studios and directed by insiders, and an authorised edit of the peak is unlikely to linger on what the Rolling Stone essay calls its cost: a closeted man playing the world’s pin-up in a ferociously homophobic decade. The calendar invites its own reading too. The North American release lands two weeks before the tenth anniversary of Michael’s death on Christmas Day, with a deluxe box set already in the shops.

Morahan and Austin share the directing credit. The feature screens after Finding Faith, an original short by Mary McCartney that places the tour in context, and the release also draws on a previously unheard interview with Michael, photographs by Herb Ritts and behind-the-scenes footage from the Faith video. The soundtrack was remixed at Abbey Road, according to an IMAX featurette promoting the release. Universal Pictures Content Group handles the international rollout; Crosswalk, the event-cinema division of Bleecker Street, has North America, where IMAX will host early-access screenings. The film runs 113 minutes. The restoration works from the 35mm footage of all 14 cameras.

George Michael: The Faith Tour premiered in London on 27 October 2026 and opened in UK and Irish cinemas through Universal on 6 November 2026; Australia follows on 12 November. In the United States and Canada it opens on 11 December, after the IMAX early-access screenings. The live album, also called The Faith Tour, came out on 6 November on George Michael Entertainment and Sony Music, in editions up to a box set with a 136-page book of unseen tour photography. Every night of that tour Michael sang, in Faith, about showing a lover the door. He soon showed the pop-idol role the same courtesy, and this film is the first time anyone has been let back in.

Tags: documentary, George Michael, Andy Morahan, David Austin, George Michael: The Faith Tour, Mary McCartney

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