Helen Reddy died on September 29th, 2020, a month after the film was released in the US and Australia.
Film director Unjoo Moon, while knowing little of Helen Reddy's later life, had powerful memories of the influence of her music, particularly of 'I Am Woman', on her mother and her mother's friends at the time it topped the charts. A few years ago, when at an awards ceremony in Los Angeles, she saw Reddy's name on a place card next to her husband, cinematographer Dion Beebe, she made a split decision to swap seats, setting in place a chain of events that lead to the production of the film 'I Am Woman'. Moon spent the evening talking to Reddy, hearing about her life. Moon became friends with Reddy and her family subsequently entrusting Moon to tell her story on film.
The movie's screenplay drew from Helen Reddy's auto-biography 'The Woman I Am: A Memoir' (2005). The film was made and first released just under fifteen year's after its first publication.
The film was selected to be the Opening Night Film at the 2020 Gold Coast Film Festival in Queensland, Australia but the event was cancelled due to the global health pandemic.
"You and Me Against the World" was the first song written by Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams and began as a gag song: Williams and Ascher, a member of Williams's band, had a discussion about their favorite songwriters which led to the spontaneous composition of a song on the subject whose tune, Ascher then realized, had real hit potential. Williams himself debuted "You and Me Against the World" on his 1974 album Here Comes Inspiration, singing it as a traditional love ballad. Helen Reddy considered the song's lyrics too "paternalistic" to be convincing as a woman's declaration of love for a man; instead, she interpreted the song as a mother singing to a child, which her version clarified by her daughter Traci's speaking to "Mommy" at the start and end