Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan

Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan
Directed byAlma Har'el
Produced byAlma Har'el
Christopher Leggett
Raphael Marmor
StarringBob Dylan
CinematographyLol Crawley
Edited byAlma Har'el
Music byBob Dylan
Distributed byVeeps, Apple TV+
Release date
  • July 18, 2021 (2021-07-18) (Streaming Premiere)
Running time
50 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Shadow Kingdom is a 2021 concert film featuring American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Directed by Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har'el, it was shot on a soundstage in Santa Monica, California, over seven days in 2021 while Dylan was sidelined from his Never Ending Tour due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film features Dylan and a group of masked musicians performing 13 songs from the first half of Dylan's career in an intimate club-like setting.

Shadow Kingdom premiered via the livestream platform Veeps.com with little information about its contents having been revealed in pre-release publicity. Some viewers expected the event to be a live concert and were surprised when it turned out to be a stylized black-and-white art film featuring "pre-recorded set pieces" instead. Shadow Kingdom nonetheless earned rave reviews from critics, many of whom praised Dylan's creative re-arrangements of his early songs as well as Har'el's imaginative staging of the performances.

A soundtrack album, Shadow Kingdom, was released on June 2, 2023, and the full-length film was released four days later as a rental and digital download.