In the flickering half-light of an editing suite, a figure hunches over monitors filled with decades-old footage like grainy home videos, television broadcasts, and cellphone clips. This is where Asif Kapadia, perhaps the most significant British documentarian of the 21st century, performs his peculiar magic.
Best known for his trilogy of portrait documentaries — Senna (2010), Amy (2015), and Diego Maradona (2019) — Kapadia’s signature style transforms dusty archival scraps into living, breathing cinema that collapses the distance between past and present, subject and viewer.
With his latest work, 2073, Kapadia uses archival material not to reconstruct what was, but to imagine what might be.
“I would say my films, documentaries particularly, are like a mosaic,” Kapadia notes. “It’s almost like the whole thing comes together and it’s a bit of a mirror.”
The Temporal Disruption of 2073
With 2073, Kapadia pushes his archival methodology into unprecedented territory. Rather than using found footage to reconstruct the past, he repurposes it to imagine a dystopian future.
“Every day I read the news, it just feels more and more dystopian,” Kapadia observes. “Everything happening just feels so strange and you can’t believe that’s actually happened. Every day the news just becomes more and more futuristic and sci-fi and terrifying.”
Inspired by Chris Marker’s landmark 1962 film La Jetée, which constructed a time-travel narrative entirely through still photographs, Kapadia wondered, “If he can do it with stills and black and white, can I do a film set in a future by captioning things using archive?”
Working with cinematographer Bradford Young, Kapadia created future sequences using LED stage technology similar to that used in productions like The Mandalorian. These dramatic scenes, featuring Samantha Morton as a survivor in this imagined future, are intercut with archival footage repurposed through context and captioning to suggest future events.
This formal innovation required an unprecedented approach to production. Kapadia brought in two separate editing teams — Chris King for documentary sequences and Sylvie Landra for dramatic portions — creating what he describes as “two different creative brains for the two different films.”
The disorientation this creates for viewers is deliberate: We are never quite sure if we’re watching history, prediction, or some unsettling combination of both.
Kapadia’s Forensic Work in Senna
The quiet radicalism of Kapadia’s approach on Senna, centered around the late Brazilian racecar driver Ayrton Senna, begins long before the editing stage. For nine months during pre-production, while contracts and financing were being finalized, Kapadia immersed himself in footage. “All I did was go to the office and watch YouTube clips,” he recalls. “In a way, for nine months, I was studying my main character and I got to know everything about him, seeing things through his eyes. When is he lying? When is he happy? When is he unhappy? When is he in trouble? When is he in pain? What’s his tell? I could just study him and understand him in a way that when you are writing a movie, you write a screenplay, you learn about your characters,” Kapadia notes.
“Before I’d officially started making the film, my instinct was, I’m never going to interview anyone and I’m not going to show them on screen,” Kapadia explains. “I’m just going to make it with the material that we find.”
Without the mediating presence of survivors recounting memories, the past exists in a perpetual present tense.
The editing never draws attention to itself, yet achieves moments of extraordinary beauty and tension. In Senna, the sequence of the driver’s fatal crash at Imola, unfolds with a restraint that respects both the tragedy and the viewer, cutting between multiple camera angles, radio communications, and reaction shots to create a sense of impending doom without exploitative close-ups or melodramatic music cues.
Amy, Amy, Amy
With Amy, Kapadia spent months reviewing home videos, concert footage, and paparazzi clips, discovering a different person than the tabloid caricature of Winehouse. His eye detected moments of sly humor, artistic integrity, and vulnerability that conventional biographical narratives had missed. The resulting portrait revealed the humanity behind the spectacle of addiction and fame, allowing viewers to see Winehouse afresh through carefully selected visual moments that captured her essence.
Kapadia and King constructed a devastating sequence around Winehouse’s 2008 Grammy win, intercutting the celebratory event with a friend’s recollection that Winehouse told her, “This is so boring without drugs.” The juxtaposition creates a more profound understanding of addiction than any explicit commentary could provide.
Music plays a crucial role in this emotional architecture. Kapadia’s long-term collaborations with composers, particularly Antonio Pinto who scored Senna, Amy, and Diego Maradona, create sonic landscapes that amplify the emotional currents of the archival material without manipulating viewers.
Kapadia’s innovative use of typography, particularly in Amy, represents another dimension of his archival transformation. By placing Winehouse’s lyrics on screen as she performs, he shifts viewers’ relationship to familiar songs, revealing their autobiographical dimensions.
“The idea of putting lyrics on the screen, it’s the simplest thing,” Kapadia reflects. “People kept saying, ‘Why are you putting the lyrics? We all know the words to “Back to Black.”‘ And I’m going, ‘I don’t think you do. I think you’re not really paying attention.'”
The typography itself becomes cinematic, with text appearing and dissolving in rhythm with the music, sometimes fragmenting or highlighting particular phrases for emphasis.
A Mythic Portrait of Maradona
When it came to crafting a flick about troubled Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona — who was kicked out of FIFA after a positive drug test — Kapadia approached as though he were crafting a gangster epic, not a traditional sports documentary. “It’s a genre film about gangsters and the Camorra and mafia in Naples,” he explained, “and this guy who ends up in that world but is really well seen, successful. And how can you be a footballer in that space?” Rather than flattening the soccer icon’s legacy into a highlight reel or a cautionary tale, Kapadia emphasized Maradona’s contradictions: revered yet volatile, gifted yet self-sabotaging.
Working again with editor Chris King, Kapadia wove together thousands of hours of archival footage — most of it in Spanish and Italian — into a kinetic, nonlinear narrative that avoids talking heads entirely. The result is immersive, disorienting, and intimate, echoing the disarray of Maradona’s personal life. “In that one, it was a different situation because he was still alive,” Kapadia said of Maradona, who died of a heart attack in 2020, one year after the film’s release, “but I decided just to focus on one particular section of his life and not the whole story.”
Kapadia’s formal restraint allows the archival material to do the heavy lifting. Footage of Maradona walking through crowded streets, flanked by handlers and swarmed by fans, becomes its own kind of vérité poetry — quietly surreal, darkly comic. Maradona’s charisma is undeniable, but so is his unraveling.
What emerges is not just a portrait of a man, but of a system — media, fandom, organized crime — that consumed him. “It’s a film about a soccer player,” Kapadia noted, “but actually, it’s a gangster film.” And in that transformation, chaos becomes clarity.
