Inside Lisa’s Documentary: How Blackpink’s Race Scandal Played Out On Camera
A new documentary about Blackpink star Lisa Manobal opens with an uncomfortable question: what does it feel like to become the centre of an online scandal?
Always Lalisa, which hits cinemas on Monday, 12 October, follows the K-pop star — also known for her breakout role in The White Lotus — through a controversy that erupted just as she was preparing for a pivotal Coachella performance in 2025. Leaked footage from the group’s trainee years showed the four Blackpink members covering American rap songs with racial slurs, including the n-word, left uncensored. Fans demanded an apology, but the band’s record label forbade the members from issuing a statement.
Director Sue Kim was with Lisa in her dressing room as the crisis unfolded. “I said, ‘Look, I know this is new. I know you guys are wildly confused and hurt, but this is your time to say whatever you want to say — even if you’re just processing your thoughts and telling us what you’re feeling,'” Kim tells the BBC, adding she had “honestly expected her to say no.”
Instead, Lisa lay down on a sofa and, in Kim’s words, spoke from the heart for close to an hour, unscripted. “It’s bad,” she says in the film, before explaining she was “15 or 16” when the clips were filmed and “didn’t know that [word] was sensitive because I’m from Thailand and my first language is not English” — having picked up the term from rap music without grasping its history. “Now I would never ever do that because, now, I’ve got education,” she says. “Now I know better.” Lisa has since apologised publicly in an interview with Variety, though some critics remain unconvinced.
Kim calls the moment “one of the most important scenes” in the film precisely because of its lack of polish. “There was no premeditation on Lisa’s part, there was no media training,” she says. “I asked her one question and she just talked for an hour, and everything came out, and it’s all stream of consciousness… And what you see with Lisa in that moment is so genuine, it’s impossible not to feel compassion for her.”
A bigger story of breaking away
The scandal overshadowed what should have been a celebratory moment: the launch of Lisa’s debut solo album, Alter Ego. The documentary shows her receiving death threats yet continuing public appearances regardless. It also charts a more personal rebellion — her decision to leave Korean label YG, which discovered her as a teenager, for a new deal with America’s RCA Records, partly so she could live her life, including dating, on her own terms. “Knowing her as I do, that took an immense amount of courage,” Kim says, noting that years of training within the K-pop system make such a break unusually disruptive for someone she describes as “a very kind, sweet person.”
Although the film was commissioned by the film division of Lisa’s own record label — the same company behind a recent, less candid Oasis documentary — Kim insists it isn’t simply a polished marketing exercise. The director also shows Lisa fumbling in the recording studio and being criticised by her vocal coach, and says Lisa never asked to cut a single scene after watching the finished film. “You never know when you meet an artist how transparent they’ll be. And I have to give all credit to Lisa because she allowed us almost total access,” Kim says. “And when I showed her the film, she never asked me to remove a single scene. That’s exceptional.”
Source: BBC News