Kanye West 'In Whose Name?' Teaser: Kim Kardashian Featured in First Look at 'Raw' Documentary

A minute-long teaser for the Ye-focused documentary In Whose Name? has been released roughly nine months after its existence was first announced to the world.

The brief glimpse at the Nico Ballesteros-directed documentary, first shared as an exclusive by Deadline on Wednesday, opens with Ye saying, “I’m off my meds for five months now.”

Later, Ye directly mentions his bipolar disorder diagnosis, which he has publicly questioned in more recent years. In the doc teaser, he champions the diagnosis as a strength, not unlike the messaging surrounding his self-titled 2018 album made during his marathon GOOD Music sessions in Wyoming.

“You know the best thing about being an artist and bipolar? Anything you do and say is an art piece,” he’s heard saying.

Kim Kardashian, to whom Ye was married until 2022, is prominently featured in the first look at Ballesteros's film, which he’s said to have started working on in 2018 when he was just 18 years old. The filmmaker's previous work includes 070 Shake’s “Purple Walls” video in 2022.

"I started filming my days when I was eight years old,” Ballesteros said in a statement shared with Complex on Wednesday. “For a shy kid, the camera became both a shield and a window, a way to channel my introspection while still engaging with the world. Ye has always had someone filming him too, a lens between him and the noise. Maybe that’s why we understood each other without saying much. I was able to fade into the background, stay present, the camera always rolling, catching moments outside the public performance."

Producer Simran A. Singh also shared a statement, saying Nico’s “raw and often unsettling portrait” of Ye started with the filmmaker “not fully knowing” where the project would take him.

“There was no agenda, no filter; just real, raw moments,” Singh said Wednesday. “Because of that, there’s a level of honesty you don’t usually get in documentaries. As things started to take shape, it became clear that Nico was the only one who could truly tell this story. He had the access, but more importantly, he had the perspective. He was inside the chaos but somehow still able to step back and find the story to make a movie.”

When word of the doc first broke in November of last year, Utopia, a film distribution and sales company with notable titles to its name including Pavements and Megadoc (the latter documenting the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s criminally underrated Megalopolis), was said to be involved. There is no mention of Utopia, however, in conjunction with Wednesday’s teaser release.

Instead, AMSI Entertainment is behind its theatrical rollout on Sept. 19. Complex has reached out to Utopia reps for clarification.

“The film follows Ye’s ascent to becoming the richest Black man in American history while uncovering why the superstar risked everything he had built in the name of freedom,” a synopsis previously shared in November reads. “Examining the culture that birthed the star, In Whose Name? explores the overlapping influences of corporate exploitation, racial complexities, and psychological struggles inherent in the American dream.”

At the time, press notes added that Ballesteros was “armed with an iPhone” when he first started filming for the project, with a Utopia exec quoted as saying the resulting doc “invites audiences to draw their own conclusions” on fame and other themes.

A screenshot shared by Nico that same month showed an apparent text about the film from Ye. The text read, in part, “It was like being dead and looking back on my life.”

Though not much has been revealed about what all will be included in the final cut of Nico’s film, given the years he was embedded with Ye, not to mention key shots from the just-released teaser, it seems likely the artist’s Hitler-praising Alex Jones interview and the ensuing fallout will be documented in some capacity.