Asif Kapadia

Asif Kapadia
Kapadia at the premiere of Senna (2010)
Born	1972 (age 52–53) London Borough of Hackney, England
Occupation	Filmmaker
Years active	1997–present
Notable work	The Sheep Thief (1997) The Warrior (2001) Senna (2010) Amy (2015) Diego Maradona (2019)
Spouse	Victoria Harwood (m. 2006)

Asif Kapadia (born 1972) is a British filmmaker. Kapadia is best known for his trilogy of narratively driven, archive-constructed documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona.

Amy (2015), based on singer Amy Winehouse, had its world premiere at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and it is the highest-grossing British documentary of all time at the UK box office. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the BAFTA for Best Documentary, a Grammy for Best Music Film, the European Film Award for Best Documentary and the Grierson Award for Best Documentary.

Kapadia directed the documentary film Senna (2010), based on Ayrton Senna (famous for his achievements in motor racing), which won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, the BAFTA Award for Best Editing and the World Cinema Audience Award Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2011. Senna was nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year.

Kapadia's narrative debut The Warrior (2001), won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film of the Year and the Award for Special Achievement by a Director, Writer or Producer in their Debut Feature; the film was also nominated for Best Film Not in the English Language.

In 2019, he released the film Diego Maradona, based on Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, with Kapadia stating, "Maradona is the third part of a trilogy about child geniuses and fame."^[1]

In May 2021, he released the musical docuseries 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything, based on the book 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, by the British music journalist David Hepworth.^[2]

Asif Kapadia was born in 1972 in north London, to an Indian Muslim ^[3][4] British family. He attended Newport Film School (formerly part of the University of Wales, Newport, now the University of South Wales),^[5] achieved a first-class degree (BA Hons) in Film, TV and Photographic Arts from the University of Westminster^[6] and an MA (RCA) in Directing for Film and TV at the Royal College of Art.

Kapadia has said he sees himself as a Londoner ("a Hackney lad"), northern European, with Indian family heritage. These unique characteristics helped to make him stand out as a film-maker when he was starting out.^[7][8]

He has said:

“I’ve always tried to do things differently – because my point of view is different.

“I don’t come from private school, I don’t come from money. My family were not in the film industry. I’m not white, I’m brown, and my background is Muslim. My family are from India and are quite religious.

“As the youngest of five kids, my parents kind of let me do what I wanted to do. I was able to have a point of view, I wasn’t told, ‘You must do this’: I picked what I wanted to study, I never did A-levels. When I was at university, I would always argue with the tutors, because I would kind of have to do what they told me to do.

“Things like that were just me going, ‘I don’t feel that’s right, I’m gonna do this’. So I’m quite stubborn, I guess.”^[9]

Kapadia's first feature film, The Warrior,^[10] was shot in the Himalayas and the deserts of Rajasthan. The film caught the attention of The Arts Foundation who in 2001 awarded him a fellowship in Film Directing. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described The Warrior as possessing "mighty breadth" and "shimmering beauty";^[11] the film was nominated for three BAFTA awards, winning two: the Alexander Korda Award for the outstanding British Film of the Year 2003 and The Carl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a Director, Screenwriter or Producer in their First Feature.

Far North premiered at the Venice Film Festival, based on a dark short story by Sara Maitland. Kapadia used the brutal arctic landscape to show how desperation and loneliness drives a woman to harm the person she loves. Kapadia's fourth feature, Senna, was the life story of Brazilian motor-racing champion, Ayrton Senna.

Kapadia's next film Amy was a documentary that depicted the life and death of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. Amy was released on 3 July 2015 in the United Kingdom, New York and Los Angeles, and worldwide on 10 July. The film has been described as "heartbreaking", "awe-inspiring", "unmissable", "the best documentary of the year" and "a tragic masterpiece". The film received five out of five star ratings when it was reviewed at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival in May. The film has become the highest grossing British documentary, and second highest grossing documentary of all time in the United Kingdom, overtaking Kapadia's 2010 movie Senna.^[12][13]

In 2018, a documentary film titled Maradona, based on Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, was released. Following on from Senna and Amy, Kapadia states: "Maradona is the third part of a trilogy about child geniuses and fame."^[1] He added: "I was fascinated by his journey, wherever he went there were moments of incredible brilliance and drama. He was a leader, taking his teams to the very top, but also many lows in his career. He was always the little guy fighting against the system... and he was willing to do anything, to use all of his cunning and intelligence to win."^[14]

In 2019, Kapadia was awarded as Honorary Associate of London Film School.^[15]

In 2022, Kapadia participated in the Sight & Sound film polls of that year. It is held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, by asking contemporary directors to select ten films of their choice.^[16]

Kapadia's selections were:

In September 2019, Kapadia appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme in which he told presenter Francine Stock of his love for the Vietnamese gangster movie Cyclo by writer-director Trần Anh Hùng. He saw it when it first came out in 1996, when he was a film student, and it crystallised his ambitions for the type of film-making he wished to pursue. As he explained to Stock, "a lightbulb went off in my head" and his life was never the same again.^[8]

In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, Kapadia signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."^[17][18]

In October 2024, Kapadia attracted controversy, after sharing posts on the social media platform X, which The Grierson Trust had deemed as "antisemitic" (and to which the charity removed Kapadia as a patron). Kapadia apologized, telling BBC News he was "mortified by the hurt and offence" that some of his posts have caused.^[19]

• Asif Kapadia at IMDb