'If You Care About Mental Health, You Should Watch' Trailer Drops For New Britney Spears Doc

Netflix has dropped a trailer for a new documentary about Britney Spears’ conservatorship, which will hit the streaming platform on Sept. 28.

“I just want my life back,” the trailer for “Britney vs Spears” begins, incorporating a powerful sound bite from Spears’ groundbreaking hearing in June in which the pop icon told a judge she wanted out of the arrangement.

“Britney never had one person she could trust, not Mom, not Dad,” Adnan Ghalib, who was one of the paparazzi hounding the “Overprotected” star until they dated briefly in 2007, says in the trailer. 

The film’s director, Erin Lee Carr, notes in the trailer that “someone very close to the conservatorship” leaked her a confidential report. She told the Los Angeles Times that her film has been a two-and-a-half years long investigative project into the conservatorship. 

“If you care about women, you should watch this movie,” she said. “If you care about mental health, you should watch this movie. If you’re a fan of Britney Spears, you should watch this movie.” 

Conservatorships are typically employed for people who are deemed unable to make key decisions for themselves, yet the fact that Britney has never really stopped working, including headlining an enormously successful multi-year Las Vegas residency, had fans crying foul at the constraints she's been placed under for years. Spears compared her seven-day forced work schedule to human trafficking in June.

“My understanding of a conservatorship is that you have to be unwilling to meet a need for clothing, shelter and to feed yourself,” Carr told the Los Angeles Times. “When I see someone doing really complex dancing and performing on a stage earning millions of dollars, those things don’t seem like they belong in the same sentence. So while at times she may need help because her life has truly been crazy, it’s hard for me to think that this type of legal arrangement would be necessary.”

A lawyer featured in the trailer notes that of the clients he's represented in conservatorships, “not one of them has ever had a job.”

"It's been 13 years and it's enough,” Spears says from court says in the trailer for “Britney vs Spears,” referencing the 13 years she has been under the conservatorship.

Britney's father Jamie Spears filed a petition earlier this month to be removed from the conservatorship, citing his daughter’s recent pleas to be released from the legal arrangement. She told a judge in June that he should be in jail for conservator abuse. There has been a public outcry for her release from her conservatorship since she made it clear earlier this year that she wants her freedom back.

Carr has directed several true crime-centric documentaries that focus on women: the 2017 HBO film "Mommy Dead and Dearest” told the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a young woman who killed her mother in 2015 after experiencing years of alleged medical abuse; the 2019 documentary "I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter" explored the case of Michelle Carter, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Massachusetts after, at age 17, encouraging her boyfriend Conrad Roy III, to kill himself in 2014.