Asif Kapadia

Academy Award winner joins lineup of environmental and social justice speakers at “the beating green heart” of Glastonbury

GLASTONBURY, June 12, 2025 — Asif Kapadia, the visionary filmmaker behind acclaimed documentaries “Senna,” “Amy,” and “Diego Maradona,”) brings his latest film 2073 to Glastonbury Festival for a one-off screening and live Q&A session as part of their “Culture & Revolutionary Shifts” programming during the five-day event from June 20–25, 2023.

The Speakers Forum, described as “the beating political heart of Glastonbury Festival,” will feature 48 talks over five days covering climate change, social justice, and political activism. Kapadia joins an impressive lineup including Lord Deben (Chair of the Climate Change Committee), investigative journalists, climate scientists, and political figures addressing the urgent environmental and social challenges of our time.

Glastonbury’s Green Conscience

Kapadia’s participation reflects his commitment to addressing the intersection of culture and climate activism through his work. His latest film “2073” — a groundbreaking hybrid documentary that blends archival footage with speculative fiction — presents a dystopian future shaped by today’s environmental and political crises.

“From the world of culture we have Asif Kapadia, director of the Amy Winehouse and Senna films,” organizers noted, highlighting his role alongside satirist Jolyon Rubinstein and other cultural figures who will address how creative voices can contribute to environmental awareness and social change.

2073 is Kapadia’s most urgent and provocative work to date: a dystopian vision of the near future that poses a stark question — Who controls the machines? Blending sci-fi, documentary, and political critique, the film explores the dangers of unchecked technology, surveillance, and authoritarianism in an AI-driven world.

A Platform for Urgent Voices

The Green Futures Field Speakers Forum has become one of Glastonbury Festival’s most respected programming elements, consistently attracting high-caliber speakers from diverse backgrounds. As organizers note: “Speakers Forum is one of the jewels of Glastonbury. People go to Glasto for all sorts of reasons, and getting an injection of green tonic is one of them. The forum consistently attracts really good speakers from different strands of society.”

The stage is praised by industry leaders as an essential platform for environmental and social discourse. Justin Rowlatt, BBC Climate Editor, describes it as “the beating political heart of Glastonbury Festival. 48 talks over five days covering all aspects of the climate crisis. As well as informing the public, this is where academics, journalists, organisers and activists get together, network and make plans.”

Roger Harrabin, former BBC Environment and Energy Editor, adds: “The Speaker’s Forum is part of Glastonbury Festival’s soul. It’s a true melting pot where politicians of all stripes, activists, scientists, artists, economists, and of course the Glastonbury crowds meet to discuss climate change, inequality, justice, freedom, and anything else that’s on their mind.”

The 2025 lineup includes climate scientists, political leaders, investigative journalists, environmental activists, and cultural figures, all united in addressing the urgent challenges facing humanity and the planet.

2073 Screening & Live Q&A:

• Dates: Thursday 26th June, 19:00–20:30
• Location: Green Futures Field, The Speakers Forum Stage
• Social Media: #glastonburyspeakersforum

For detailed talk descriptions and schedule information, visit: https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/areas/the-green-fields/green-futures/speakers-forum/

Academy Award Winner Asif Kapadia Brings Dystopian Documentary “2073” to International Audiences with Exclusive Events and Q&A Sessions

Oscar-winning director presents groundbreaking hybrid film warning of humanity’s future at special screenings across Europe

LONDON, June 12, 2025 — Academy Award and BAFTA winner Asif Kapadia, the visionary filmmaker behind acclaimed documentaries “Senna,” “Amy,” and “Diego Maradona,” is embarking on a series of exclusive events to present his latest work, “2073,” a provocative hybrid documentary that blends science fiction with contemporary reality to deliver an urgent warning about humanity’s future.

The film, which has garnered international attention since its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, depicts a dystopian world in 2073 where surveillance drones fill burnt orange skies and militarized police patrol devastated streets. Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton stars as a survivor haunted by visions of the past — our present — visualized through contemporary footage of today’s global crises including authoritarianism, unchecked technology, inequality, and climate change.

Upcoming Events and Screenings

Genesis Cinema, London — June 15, 2025

• Screening of “2073” followed by exclusive Q&A between Director Asif Kapadia and investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr
• Event time: 18:30
• Venue: Genesis Cinema, 93–95 Mile End Road, Whitechapel, London E1 4UJ

Previous Special Screenings Include:

• Bologna, Italy — Pop Up Cinema Jolly 4K (June 11) as part of Biografilm Festival’s Top Doc series
• Turin, Italy — Festival Cinemambiente (June 10)
• Naples, Italy — Cinema Posillipo (June 8)
• Rome, Italy — Cinema 4 Fontane (June 12)

A Film for Our Times

“2073” represents Kapadia’s most ambitious work to date, combining his signature documentary style with speculative fiction to create what he describes as a “vital cinematic warning from a dystopian future.” The film integrates archival footage, contemporary media, satellite imagery, and interviews with prominent journalists including Maria Ressa, Rana Ayyub, and Carole Cadwalladr — all of whom have faced significant risks for their reporting on authoritarianism and corruption.

“The most terrifying things in the film are facts,” Kapadia explains. “The most shocking things are being said by real people who are actually now in power.”

Industry Recognition and Support

The film has received the patronage of Amnesty International Italia, underlining its significance as both an artistic achievement and a human rights statement. According to Amnesty International Italia, “2073 shows the future where we cannot and must not arrive, but also reminds us that the present is the last call for necessary collective awareness.”

2073 has found support from Neon and other independent distributors committed to protecting challenging cinema. The film will be distributed in Italian theaters by Filmclub Distribuzione with Minerva Pictures and Rarovideo Channel.

About Asif Kapadia

Asif Kapadia is an Academy Award-winning director known for his innovative approach to documentary filmmaking. His previous works include “Senna” (2010), which revolutionized sports documentaries, and “Amy” (2015), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. His unique style of constructing narratives entirely from archival footage has influenced a generation of documentary filmmakers.

Born in London to parents from India and raised with a global perspective, Kapadia brings an outsider’s eye to his subjects, connecting patterns across different cultures and societies. His work consistently pushes the boundaries between documentary and narrative filmmaking.

Film Details

Title: 2073
Director: Asif Kapadia
Running Time: 83 minutes
Genre: Documentary, Sci-Fi
Release Date: June 15, 2025
Starring: Samantha Morton
Cinematographer: Bradford Young
Editors: Chris King, Sylvie Landra

For more information about screenings and events, visit the respective cinema websites or contact the distributors directly.

Beyond Conventional Boundaries

Asif Kapadia operates in the space where limitations breed creativity. The BAFTA and Oscar-winning film-maker has cultivated a distinctive approach throughout his career, from his early narrative work like “The Warrior” to acclaimed documentaries such as “Senna,” “Amy,” and more recently “2073.” His perspective challenges the conventional wisdom that artistic freedom requires abundant resources and time.

“I did a very unusual film during lockdown, which called Creature, which is a ballet film,” Kapadia recounts. “I’ve never been to the ballet, I don’t know anything about ballet, I don’t know anything about dance.” Yet this unfamiliarity with the form became an advantage rather than a hindrance, allowing him to approach the subject with fresh eyes.

The Power of Imposed Constraints

For Kapadia, limitations are not merely obstacles to overcome but catalysts for innovation. The “Creature” project exemplifies this approach — a feature film shot in just 10 days and edited in three weeks during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown.

“That was like a weird sideways twist because it’s me going into the unknown but also making something very fast, which I now try to do as often as possible,” he explains. This deliberately accelerated timeline represents a conscious choice rather than a reluctant compromise.

Rather than viewing these constraints as limitations, Kapadia describes their liberating effect: “You’re freer, the budget is often smaller or you have a deadline.” This perspective challenges the assumption that artistic quality necessarily correlates with extended production schedules and ample resources.

The Discipline of Deadlines

Central to Kapadia’s philosophy is the importance of deadlines as creative catalysts. “I think the most important thing, and the thing that when I teach at film schools is the thing that you need in life is a deadline,” he asserts. “If you’re forced to do something, you will come up with a solution, a creative answer.”

This viewpoint extends beyond mere pragmatism into a deeper understanding of creative psychology. Kapadia acknowledges his own tendencies when working without constraints: “The reason why I’m not particularly great at sitting at home and writing screenplays is if you don’t have a deadline, I’ll just write forever. I’ll never crack it.”

The contrast between his early and more recent work illustrates this evolution in approach. His first feature film, “The Warrior,” was shot over 65 days, while more recent projects like “Creature” and the Roger Federer documentary were completed in a fraction of that time.

The Art of Selection

When working with strict limitations, decisions about what to include and exclude become crucial. Kapadia’s documentary approach often involves sifting through enormous archives of material to distill the essential elements of a story.

This process requires a disciplined eye for meaningful details. “When you’re making a studio film or when you’re working with finances, they might force you to compromise, but you’ve got to have certain things where you’re like, I’m not going to compromise on that,” he explains.

This selective focus extends to Kapadia’s collaboration with his teams. “Just because you don’t have a lot of money. So creature was no money,” he notes. “I’ve made short films probably that have more money, but that means that you have to get the right team that are willing to work on a project.”

From Necessity to Method

What began as a practical response to financial constraints has evolved into a deliberate methodology. Kapadia now alternates between longer, more time-intensive documentary projects and quicker, more experimental work. This dual-track approach allows him to maintain creative vitality whilst pursuing longer-term endeavours.

His process demonstrates that constraints can actually enhance rather than diminish creative output. “I think directors that I like are the directors who can do lots of things,” he observes, suggesting that versatility and adaptability represent artistic strengths rather than compromises.

The Value of Outsider Perspective

Kapadia’s willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory — from ballet to sports documentaries — reflects a broader commitment to maintaining an outsider’s perspective. This approach often yields fresh insights that might elude those more embedded in a particular discipline.

“Because I’m an outsider to that world, I shot it in a way that normally they’re not made, got an amazing crew together and we’ve shot it in 10 days for a feature film that is nothing,” he explains about his ballet film. This outsider status allows Kapadia to approach subjects without preconceived notions about how they should be portrayed. The resulting work often challenges conventions and offers new perspectives on familiar subjects.

Transforming Limitations into Advantages

Throughout his career, Kapadia has consistently transformed limitations into creative advantages. This approach suggests broader implications for creative practice beyond film-making — the idea that constraints can serve as frameworks for innovation rather than barriers to it.

By embracing limitations rather than merely accepting them, Kapadia has developed a distinctive methodology that produces compelling work efficiently. His experiences demonstrate that creative freedom can sometimes emerge most powerfully within clearly defined boundaries rather than in their absence.

For aspiring film-makers navigating the challenges of limited resources, Kapadia’s approach provides a valuable model. Rather than waiting for ideal circumstances that may never materialise, his work suggests the value of embracing constraints and allowing them to shape and focus creative vision.

In Asif Kapadia’s filmmaking universe, the most transformative creative moments often emerge from periods of constraint. The Oscar-winning director of Amy and Senna works with a methodology that might appear paradoxical to outsiders: he thrives within limitations, embraces the accidents, and above all, protects his vision by maintaining a conspicuous silence until the work is ready to speak for itself.

“I generally have a process of working very quietly and I never do press while I’m making something,” Kapadia explains, sitting in his London studio. “I only do press when it’s coming out.” This patient approach, refined over decades of crafting visually stunning narratives, has become fundamental to how he builds his cinematic worlds — both within documentary and fiction.

His method begins with an extended period of immersion, where he studies his subjects with a nearly anthropological intensity. For Senna, his groundbreaking documentary about Formula One legend Ayrton Senna, a contractual delay that might have demoralised another filmmaker instead became pivotal to his vision.

“It was nine or ten months where I was meant to be making it, but the contracts were taking so long,” he recalls. “I couldn’t hire anyone, I couldn’t shoot anything.” During this limbo, Kapadia would go to his office daily, studying YouTube clips of Senna with just an assistant editor, absorbing every nuance of his subject.

“I literally had worked out how to do the film using footage with no interviews, with him narrating it, before I’d officially started on it,” he says. This approach — eschewing talking heads in favour of pure archival immersion — would become a signature technique, though it faced significant resistance from producers and studios.

“Everyone’s like, ‘But that’s what documentaries do,’” he remembers being told repeatedly. “‘They have someone, the filmmaker, holding the microphone, the filmmaker’s voiceover, interviews with who’s talking.’” Kapadia’s response was resolute: “For me, that’s bad filmmaking. It should all just be a film.”

The Shadow of Scorsese

While Kapadia has developed his own distinctive visual language, he acknowledges Martin Scorsese as a persistent influence. The relationship between the two filmmakers has evolved beyond mere admiration into a genuine creative dialogue.

“He’s someone I know who has seen my films and I’ve talked to him quite a lot over the years,” Kapadia says. “When I’m in New York, I’d just call up his office and say, ‘Look, I’m in New York.’ And they’d be like, ‘Yeah, come over for tea.’ And I’d go to his house for a cup of tea.”

What Kapadia values most about Scorsese isn’t just his narrative technique but his versatility — how the director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas moves fluidly between documentary and fiction. “He’s always done both docs and drama, and I’ve always kind of liked that,” Kapadia notes, referencing Scorsese’s documentaries about the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison.

The parallels run deeper still. Just as Scorsese made the intimate documentary Italianamerican about his parents while working on Taxi Driver, Kapadia has developed a rhythm of making smaller, faster projects while his epic, years-long documentaries evolve at their own pace.

Working Fast, Working Slow

In Kapadia’s creative ecosystem, films exist on different temporal planes. While Senna, Amy, and 2073 each required around five years to complete, he deliberately embarks on faster projects in the interim.

“I used to do drama and documentaries at the same time, and now I kind of make a short doc while I’m making a longer doc,” he explains. This approach allows him to maintain creative momentum while his more ambitious works gestate.

During the pandemic, he made Creature, a ballet film featuring choreographer Akram Khan — something entirely outside his comfort zone. “I’ve never been to the ballet, I don’t know anything about ballet, I don’t know anything about dance,” he admits. Yet the constraint of a 10-day shoot and a three-week edit created an energy that he finds creatively invigorating.

“You’re freer,” he says of these faster productions. “The budget is often smaller, or you have a deadline.” This deadline, according to Kapadia, is the essential catalyst for creativity. “The thing that you need in life is a deadline. If you’re forced to do something, you will come up with a solution, a creative answer.” His current project about Liverpool football legend Kenny Dalglish follows this rapid approach.

The Documentary Renaissance

The streaming era has fundamentally changed the landscape for documentary filmmakers, a shift that Kapadia acknowledges with cautious optimism.

“I think that has changed with Netflix primarily, and people are less worried about languages or where the people are from in the world,” he notes. “I think we kind of had a boom time at the cinema and then cinema turned against docs and went towards Marvel and comic books and sequels. And then we had a sort of boom time on streamers.”

Kapadia’s own influence on this renaissance is significant. His archive-only approach in Senna helped establish a new framework for documentary storytelling, one that has been widely imitated — though as he notes, “They don’t always pull it off.”

For Kapadia, the documentary’s ascendance makes perfect sense. “Why is an actor pretending more important than the real person?” he asks, with a characteristic directness. “It’s crazy. They’re never going to be as good. Muhammad Ali is Muhammad Ali. No actor can be Muhammad Ali.”

Trust Your Gut

When asked what advice he would give to emerging filmmakers, Kapadia’s philosophy distils to several core principles: have a deadline, finish what you start, trust your gut, and learn from what goes wrong.

“Even if it’s not great, you have to just finish it at some point and then put it out there,” he insists. “I know too many people who are brilliant but who never finish anything.”

This commitment to completion carries through to his refusal to revisit or “fix” earlier work. “Whatever you make, it’s like you at a particular point of your life and then you’re not that person again,” he explains. “When you get older or when you’ve had kids or when you get married or you get divorced or something, you’re different. But you’re not going to make that film again.”

His most recent work, 2073 — a hybrid documentary that imagines a dystopian future through the lens of present-day journalism — exemplifies this philosophy of perseverance. “It had a lot of negative energy, nobody wanted to fund it,” he recalls. “People were not into the idea. They were like, ‘Why do you want to do something? It’s so depressing.’ I was like, ‘Well, I have to do it.’”

The film went on to become the number one movie on HBO Max with little promotion, resonating with viewers who connected with its urgent warning about authoritarianism and climate collapse.

Ultimately, for Kapadia, filmmaking comes down to an unwavering fidelity to one’s own instincts. “The way I look at it is, the only way you can do this is you don’t worry what other people say. You have to just follow your gut.”

In an industry increasingly driven by algorithms and market research, Kapadia’s adherence to a more intuitive, personal approach stands as both a creative principle and a quiet form of resistance. He works quietly, follows his instincts, and then — when the time is right — lets the work speak for itself.

The London borough of Hackney in the ’70s and ’80s — a vibrant patchwork of cultures, languages, and social classes — provided Asif Kapadia with his first frames of reference. Growing up as the son of Indian Muslim immigrants in this working-class district, Kapadia absorbed a perspective fundamentally different from the Oxbridge-educated filmmakers who have historically dominated British cinema. This vantage point — at once deeply British, yet positioned at the margins of cultural power — has informed every aspect of his artistic practice, from his earliest fiction features to his groundbreaking documentaries and his latest genre-bending work, 2073.

“I grew up in a part of London called Hackney in the seventies and eighties, which is every bit like Brooklyn at the time,” Kapadia reflects. “But I would say just to add, if not more multicultural, very mixed, very diverse, very working class.” This environment provided not just a backdrop but a way of seeing that would later distinguish Kapadia’s cinema from his contemporaries — a vision attuned to both the specificities of different cultural contexts and the universal patterns that connect them.

Hackney’s streets, with their confluence of sounds, colors, and stories, offered early lessons in the power of juxtaposition and the richness of cultural hybridity. For a young filmmaker developing his sensibilities in this environment, cinema could never be a rarified art form separated from social reality. Instead, it necessarily became a medium for exploring tensions between center and periphery, power and resistance, belonging and alienation.

From Fiction to Faction

Kapadia’s formal training took him from Newport Film School to the University of Westminster, where he received a first-class degree in Film, TV and Photographic Arts, and finally to the Royal College of Art for an master’s in directing. Yet despite this institutional pedigree, his early work demonstrated a determination to operate outside conventional British film industry patterns. His graduate film, The Sheep Thief (1997), was shot in the deserts of Rajasthan with nonprofessional actors drawn from local communities — a radical departure from the expected graduate project.

This pattern continued with his breakthrough feature The Warrior (2001), filmed in Hindi in the Himalayas and Rajasthan with then-unknown actor Irrfan Khan. The film won two BAFTAs, including Outstanding British Film of the Year, despite — or perhaps because of — its rejection of familiar British cinema templates. As Kapadia recalls, “My first feature film I made, not in English with no British actors, which no one had done.”

The transition from narrative fiction to documentary with 2010’s Senna represented not a rupture, but a natural evolution of Kapadia’s boundary-crossing tendencies. His fiction background provided a visual vocabulary and narrative sensibility that he would apply to found footage, creating documentaries that feel as dramatically compelling and visually considered as carefully scripted features. This liminal position between fiction and documentary — what might be called “faction” — has become Kapadia’s distinctive territory.

With Far North (2007), starring Michelle Yeoh, Kapadia explored isolation and survival in the Arctic, themes that would resurface in different contexts throughout his work. The film’s stark landscapes and focus on characters pushed to extremes prefigured the emotional terrain he would explore in his documentaries about figures like Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse, and Diego Maradona — all subjects who operated at the limits of human experience and capacity.

Rebellion Through Form

If there is a single thread that unites Kapadia’s diverse body of work, it is his consistent rejection of established formal conventions. From his student days, he demonstrated what might be called a productive disobedience toward institutional expectations. “Whenever the tutors would set a series of rules, I’d break them,” he remembers of his time at the Royal College of Art.

This spirit of formal rebellion extends into his professional practice. With Senna, he upended documentary convention by eliminating talking-head interviews entirely, using only archival footage and audio interviews. “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.”

This decision, which initially met resistance from producers and financiers, emerged not from abstract theoretical positions but from Kapadia’s intuitive understanding of how to create immediate, emotionally resonant cinema. It also stemmed from his background in fiction filmmaking, where visual storytelling takes precedence over exposition.

With Amy, the formal innovation came through typography, with Winehouse’s lyrics displayed on screen to emphasize her artistry and reveal the autobiographical dimensions of her music. For Diego Maradona, it involved structuring a sports documentary around the conventions of the gangster film, exploring the Argentine player’s time in Naples through the lens of Mafia narratives.

His latest work, 2073, represents his most radical formal experiment yet, merging documentary techniques with science fiction frameworks to create what he terms a “hybrid docufiction.” Drawing inspiration from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, 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?”

Outsiders as Subjects

The figures at the center of Kapadia’s most celebrated films — Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse, Diego Maradona — share crucial characteristics beyond their fame and tragic trajectories. Each represents a form of cultural outsider who achieved extraordinary success while maintaining a complex, often antagonistic relationship with the systems that enabled their rise.

Senna, the Brazilian racing driver who challenged Formula One’s European establishment, brought a spiritual intensity and national pride that disrupted the sport’s detached professionalism. “They’re all about an outsider,” Kapadia observes of his films. “They’re all about people who are not part of the establishment, who are fighting a system.”

Similarly, Winehouse’s raw emotional authenticity and jazz influences positioned her as an outsider within the manufactured pop landscape of the 2000s. Her resistance to industry pressures and her eventual destruction by media scrutiny and addiction form the emotional core of Kapadia’s portrait.

Maradona, rising from the slums of Buenos Aires to become football’s most controversial genius, embodies a different kind of outsider status — the working-class hero whose extraordinary talents allow him to infiltrate elite spaces while never fully belonging to them. As Kapadia notes, “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.”

These subjects reflect aspects of Kapadia’s own position within British cinema — the outsider who has achieved insider success while maintaining a distinctive perspective and approach. His empathy for their struggles against institutional power seems to emerge from personal understanding rather than abstract admiration.

With 2073, this focus on outsiders fighting systems expands beyond individual biography to encompass journalists and truth-tellers battling disinformation and authoritarianism. The film features Maria Ressa, Rana Ayyub, and Carole Cadwalladr — journalists who have faced significant personal and professional risks for their reporting. “Three women journalists who have decided their mission is to hold power and their leaders to account,” Kapadia explains. “All of them are fighting a system which is almost impossible to beat, but yet they carry on reporting.”

The Politics of Access

For Kapadia, maintaining creative independence while working within industry structures requires strategic navigation of power hierarchies. His approach bears the influence of filmmakers like Spike Lee, whom Kapadia cites as a crucial inspiration. After seeing Lee’s Do the Right Thing as a teenager, Kapadia absorbed not just the film’s aesthetic and political vision but its model of creative autonomy.

“He was very much like it’s about having a body of work,” Kapadia recalls of Lee. “And that really spoke to me as well. It’s not about making one film or two films or three films, but being there on the long term and making 10, 20 films and being judged as a career.”

This long-term perspective informs Kapadia’s approach to industry politics. Rather than compromising his vision for immediate acceptance, he pursues projects that maintain his artistic integrity while gradually building institutional support. This strategy means sometimes walking away from potentially lucrative opportunities that would require creative compromise.

After The Warrior received critical acclaim but limited distribution, Kapadia found himself directed toward Hollywood. The experience proved instructive but ultimately reinforced his commitment to independence. “I ended up doing a film in America and I made a film after this because it’s the only one I could get. It was an awful experience; it was a nightmare,” he recalls. This “turning point” led him back to European-based production and a renewed focus on maintaining creative control.

With documentaries, Kapadia discovered another route to maintaining his vision while working within industry frameworks. “Working in nonfiction and working in docs on a smaller budget, with a smaller crew and team, and with fewer executives, lets me follow my instincts,” he explains. This approach has allowed him to develop a body of work that remains personally meaningful while achieving commercial success.

Global Perspectives in a Fractured World

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Kapadia’s cinema is its genuinely global perspective — a quality increasingly valuable in an era of resurgent nationalism and cultural fragmentation. His films move fluidly across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, finding connections between seemingly disparate contexts.

This global vision emerges naturally from Kapadia’s background and experiences. “I can see that there are similarities happening where my family are from in India, where I’ve worked a lot in Latin America, Brazil, and in Argentina, and I’ve lived and worked in the U.S.,” he notes. This multinational perspective allows him to identify patterns that more parochial viewpoints might miss.

With 2073, this global sensibility becomes central to the film’s vision and impact. Using footage from approximately 60 different countries, Kapadia constructs a narrative that transcends national frameworks to address planetary concerns — climate crisis, authoritarian politics, technological surveillance. The film’s reception has varied by region, with audiences connecting to different elements depending on their local context.

“When I’m in the room, the film changes depending on who’s watching the film because different scenes have a different resonance to that audience,” Kapadia observes. In Spain, viewers focused on climate sequences that recalled recent floods in Valencia; in New York, political elements resonated more strongly given the post-election context.

This ability to speak simultaneously to multiple audiences across cultural divides represents a significant achievement in contemporary cinema. Rather than homogenizing differences into a bland internationalism, Kapadia’s work respects cultural specificity while identifying universal human concerns — a balance that reflects his own position between cultures.

The Ethics of Representation

For a filmmaker working across cultural contexts and often representing marginalized subjects, ethical questions of representation take on particular urgency. Kapadia approaches these challenges with a sensitivity informed by his own experiences of cultural misrepresentation and stereotyping.

Early in his career, while working as a runner on a film set, Kapadia witnessed white actors being “darkened up” to portray Middle Eastern characters. His response was immediate and practical: “I can’t believe you’re doing that… Give me two minutes.” He went into the street in Harrow, found actual Middle Eastern actors, and brought them to the set. This anecdote illustrates Kapadia’s pragmatic approach to representation — not abstract political positions but concrete interventions to ensure authentic depiction.

This commitment to authentic representation extends to his documentary subjects. With Amy, Kapadia sought to counter the tabloid caricature of Winehouse by emphasizing her artistry and humanity. The film includes the voices of those who knew her personally, particularly childhood friends whose perspectives had been overshadowed by more sensational accounts.

Similarly, with Diego Maradona, Kapadia navigates the challenge of representing a living subject who had become almost a caricature of himself. Through careful selection of archival material, the film distinguishes between “Diego” and “Maradona” — the vulnerable human and the larger-than-life persona he constructed to navigate fame.

For 2073, the ethical stakes shift to questions of representing potential futures without exploitative fearmongering. Kapadia grounds his speculative vision in documented facts and journalistic insights, creating a work that uses imagination to illuminate present realities rather than sensationalize future threats.

Beyond the Industry’s Horizons

Despite his success and recognition, including an Academy Award for Amy, Kapadia maintains a productive tension with the film industry establishment. This position — simultaneously inside and outside the system — allows him to benefit from institutional support while retaining his distinctive vision and independence.

Kapadia’s refusal to be confined by genre categories exemplifies this approach. “I’ve always made films that play with different genres,” he notes. “My first film was a Western, Amy was a musical, Senna was an action film, I did a film [called] Diego Maradona, which was a gangster film.” This genre fluidity represents not just stylistic versatility but resistance to industry pigeonholing.

Similarly, his willingness to work across media platforms — from cinema to television, with projects like Mindhunter for Netflix — a pragmatic approach to maintaining creative vitality in a changing media landscape. Rather than lamenting disruptions to traditional distribution models, Kapadia adapts while preserving his essential artistic vision.

With 2073, Kapadia pushes beyond current horizons to reimagine what documentary cinema can be and do. By merging archival techniques with science fiction frameworks, he creates a form that responds to our contemporary moment while suggesting new possibilities for nonfiction storytelling.

This forward-looking vision, combined with deep respect for cinema’s past, positions Kapadia as a crucial figure in contemporary British film. Neither fully integrated into establishment structures nor romantically marginalized, he occupies a productive middle ground — accessible enough to reach wide audiences while maintaining the critical perspective that comes from standing at least partially outside.

As cinema continues to navigate profound technological and cultural transformations, Kapadia’s outsider vision offers valuable guidance. His career demonstrates that the most vital filmmaking often emerges not from the center but from the periphery — from those positioned to see both the structures of power and the possibilities for resistance. In traversing the distance from Hackney to Hollywood and beyond, Kapadia has created not just a body of remarkable films but a model for navigating creative independence in an era of institutional flux.

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.

The screen glows with an unsettling luminescence as Asif Kapadia’s mindbending film 2073 unfolds, dissolving the comforting boundaries between documentary evidence and speculative vision. We enter a cinematic space where time collapses upon itself — where news footage from yesterday’s broadcast becomes archaeological evidence from tomorrow’s catastrophe. This temporal destabilization is Kapadia’s most audacious experiment yet, representing a radical break from the archival immersion that defined his celebrated trilogy on singular figures of exceptional talent and tragedy.

The filmmaker who once meticulously excavated the lives of race car driver Ayrton Senna, singer Amy Winehouse, and soccer icon Diego Maradona through existing footage now inverts his methodology completely. Where those earlier works reassembled archival fragments to recover a coherent narrative from the past, 2073 deliberately fractures our temporal perception, positioning today’s documentation as a prophetic artifact. “I’m going to show you the future, but using elements of the present, and that’s where archive comes in,” Kapadia explained in an interview, revealing the conceptual foundation of his hybrid approach.

Asif Kapadia: ‘A God’s Eye View of the Whole World’

This methodological innovation emerges from Asif Kapadia’s recognition that conventional documentary forms simply cannot capture the networked nature of contemporary political crises. “I knew there wasn’t going to be a central character,” he acknowledged. “My aim with this film was to kind of almost have a god’s eye view of the whole world.” This celestial perspective liberates Kapadia from the constraints of biographical focus, allowing him to trace connections across disparate political phenomena with a freedom that traditional documentary practice rarely permits.

The film’s most striking insight comes not from Kapadia himself but from Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, who observes of global authoritarian leaders: “It’s like they’re almost all on the WhatsApp group” — an eerily prescient observation of the March 2025 incident in which senior Trump administration officials, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, used the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss a planned military operation in Yemen. Due to an error, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat, leading to the public disclosure of sensitive military details.

This prophetic insight captures precisely what makes Kapadia’s film so revelatory — its ability to render visible the hidden choreography of authoritarianism across national boundaries. Through careful visual orchestration, Kapadia reveals not just parallels but direct connections between political developments previously treated as discrete phenomena.

Astounding Visual Execution

Working with cinematographer Bradford Young (known for the ethereal imagery of Arrival), Kapadia shot dramatic sequences on LED stages similar to those used in The Mandalorian. These technologically sophisticated scenes provide the narrative architecture that houses Kapadia’s documentary excavation. “I wrote that to put it in to give us something to cling onto as we fly around the world with these little time capsules that we created of archive events,” he shared. The result is a film that feels simultaneously grounded in factual reality and unmoored from conventional temporality.

The visual execution is remarkably seamless. Dramatic scenes featuring Samantha Morton as a survivor in a dystopian New San Francisco flow naturally into documentary footage of contemporary climate disasters, creating moments where the viewer becomes genuinely disoriented about whether they’re watching a fictional representation or factual documentation. “The footage that we show of New San Francisco … it’s all red, the red skies, all of that’s real,” Kapadia emphasized. “I haven’t manipulated that footage.”What distinguishes 2073 from conventional political documentaries is its refusal to compartmentalize crises. Where traditional media might examine climate change, democratic backsliding, and technological surveillance as discrete phenomena, Asif Kapadia weaves them into a coherent tapestry. “People make these films and they sit in little boxes … And I just thought, well, it’s all the same thing, so can I put it all into one movie?” This integrative approach allows Kapadia to reveal the hidden relationships between seemingly disparate developments — the way ecological crisis facilitates authoritarian control, how surveillance technology enables political repression, how media consolidation undermines democratic accountability.

2027’s Transnational Viewpoint

The film’s power derives partially from Kapadia’s multicultural perspective. “My background is from India. I’ve worked in Brazil, I’ve worked in Europe, I live in the UK, I’ve worked in the U.S.,’ he mused. “I just saw the same kind of elements, the same playbook happening everywhere, and I just thought, ‘It’s happening everywhere at the same time.’” This transnational vantage point allows him to recognize patterns that might remain invisible to those confined within singular national contexts. His gaze traverses borders with the same fluidity as the capital and information flows that structure our global reality, revealing connections that national frameworks systematically obscure.

What makes 2073 particularly unsettling is how quickly its prophecies seem to manifest in reality. “Every day, some of our freedom is removed, something else is changing. Some law comes in. The idea of peacefully protesting becomes illegal,” Kapadia observed.

In its final moments, 2073 resists the consolation of easy solutions or uplifting messages. “I don’t think it’s as simple as putting a neat little moment at the end of the film and saying, if you do this, everything could be great,” Asif Kapadia reflected. Instead, the film concludes with a question rather than an answer, positioning itself as the beginning of conversation rather than its conclusion. This refusal of false comfort represents perhaps Kapadia’s most radical gesture — a recognition that cinema’s true political power lies not in offering reassurance but in altering perception. We leave the theater with vision transformed, newly attuned to connections previously invisible, equipped with a perceptual framework that renders legible the networked nature of contemporary authoritarianism. In this sense, 2073 represents nothing less than a new visual epistemology for our fragmented political moment — a way of seeing that might just be the precondition for effective resistance.

META: Asif Kapadia says of his latest film, “I want to shock the audience into action, not make them feel comfortable.”

In a dimly lit editing suite in London, filmmaker Asif Kapadia is grappling with time itself. His latest work, 2073, represents both a culmination and departure from the groundbreaking documentary style he pioneered with 2010’s Senna and 2015’s Amy. But where those films excavated the past through innovative use of archival footage, 2073 dares to imagine a future shaped by our present failures — a vision perhaps unconsciously influenced by Kapadia’s own experience of surveillance and suspicion.

“Every day I read the news, it just feels more and more dystopian,” Kapadia reflects. “Everything happening just feels so strange and you can’t believe that’s actually happened. Some of them, every day the news just becomes more and more futuristic and sci-fi and terrifying.”

This sense of creeping dystopia isn’t merely theoretical for Asif Kapadia. Following a taxi driver’s report of him photographing New York cityscapes in the early 2000s, he spent nearly a decade on a U.S. watch list, experiencing firsthand the surveillance apparatus his new film now critiques.

The Origins of Asif Kapadia’s 2073

The genesis of 2073 emerged from Kapadia’s growing unease with global political shifts and the rise of technology-enabled surveillance. Drawing inspiration from Chris Marker’s La Jetée — a landmark of experimental cinema told 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?”

This deceptively simple question led to an ambitious fusion of documentary and science fiction techniques. Working with cinematographer Bradford Young and two separate editing teams — Chris King for documentary sequences and Sylvie Landra for dramatic portions, the editors working on the film at different times — Kapadia crafted what could be called hybrid docu-fiction. The film’s visual language shifts seamlessly between archival footage, dramatic sequences filmed on LED stages (similar to The Mandalorian’s volume technology), and interviews with journalists like Maria Ressa and Carole Cadwalladr, who have been sounding alarms about democracy’s erosion.

The production process was equally innovative. Racing against an impending writers strike, Asif Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni crafted the script in just three weeks. “I set a really tight deadline to get it made,” Kapadia explains, “and we managed to hit the deadline.” This urgency perhaps mirrors the film’s own warnings about time running out for democratic societies.

A Survivor Named Ghost

The film’s underground sequences, featuring actress Samantha Morton as a survivor named Ghost, were created through a groundbreaking combination of LED technology and documentary footage. “All of the people that she sees are from news footage, documentaries, and they’re all shots from around the world,” Kapadia reveals. “So the idea that the whole world is now existing underground and nobody lives in homes anymore on streets because that’s all gone. You have the mega-wealthy and the skyscrapers, and they have everything, and then you have people with nothing and there’s nothing in between.”

This dystopian vision draws clear influence from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, which Asif Kapadia admires for its grounding of future scenarios in recognizable present-day reality. “It had this very down-to-earth look like normal London, but it’s slightly off and futuristic,” he notes. Similarly, 2073 uses familiar archival footage to construct its future scenarios, creating an uncanny bridge between present and future.

Asif Kapadia: ‘The Film Changes’

The film’s reception has varied fascinatingly by region, with audiences finding different resonances depending on their local political contexts. “When I’m in the room, the film changes depending on who’s watching the film because different scenes have a different resonance to that audience,” Kapadia observes. This kaleidoscopic effect seems appropriate for a work that seeks to capture global patterns of democratic decay and technological control.

For Kapadia, who emerged from the British independent film scene with The Warrior before revolutionizing documentary form with Senna, this latest evolution feels natural. “I always try to work that way where it breaks the rules of traditionally how you’re meant to make films,” he says. This spirit of formal innovation has characterized his career from the beginning, but never has it been deployed toward such urgent ends.

The result is a work that defies easy categorization: part warning, part meditation on power and surveillance, part experimental cinema. Through this ambitious fusion of documentary technique and science fiction framework, Kapadia has created something that transcends both genres — a warning from tomorrow about the choices we face today.

“I want to shock the audience into action,” Kapadia states plainly, “not make them feel comfortable saying, ‘Oh, if you go out and vote, everything will be great.’ I don’t feel like that.” This refusal of easy comfort has defined Kapadia’s work from the beginning. His trilogy of Senna, Amy, and 2019’s Diego Maradona explored the human cost of fame and genius. With 2073, he turns that unsparing lens on our collective future. The question that haunts the film is whether we’ll heed its warning in time.

META: Filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s collaboration with Chris King is creating a new chapter in movie history.

Chris King was editing music documentaries in the late ’90s when he first worked with Asif Kapadia. Their professional relationship, starting with Senna, a documentary about Brazilian race-car driver Ayrton Senna, developed from necessity rather than grand design. Editor Gregers Sall also worked on the film, which saw a distinctive approach to documentary filmmaking that continues to evolve with Kapadia’s latest work, 2073.

For nine months while he waited for contracts for Senna to be finalized, Kapadia recalls, “I couldn’t hire a crew. I couldn’t hire an editor, I couldn’t film anything. I wasn’t getting paid. All I did was go to the office and watch YouTube clips … and in a way, for nine months, I was studying my main character and I got to know everything about him looking at his eyes.” This period of studying footage led to an archive-first approach that would define Kapadia and King’s later work. Says Kapadia, “Chris King came in quite late into the process but made it tighter and turned it into a commercial hit.”

Asif Kapadia’s Award-Winning Amy

When Kapadia and King began work on the moving movie about tragic singer Amy Winehouse, they faced new challenges integrating music meaningfully into the narrative. “The idea of putting lyrics on the screen, it’s the simplest thing,” Kapadia notes. “Because 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.’”

Another differentiator in Asif Kapadia’s work is his interview technique, which evolved significantly with each project. For Diego Maradona, Kapadia developed an intricate system using multiple translators for the Argentine football legend and live feedback from his London team. This complex approach allowed them to navigate Maradona’s particular way of speaking, which even native Spanish speakers sometimes struggled to understand.

Breaking the Mold with 2073

With their latest collab, 2073, Kapadia and King have pushed their methods further still. Working with cinematographer Bradford Young, they created future sequences using LED stage technology similar to that used in The Mandalorian. These scenes required a different approach to integration with documentary footage. “All of the people that she sees are from news footage, documentaries, and they’re all shots from around the world,” Kapadia explains of the underground sequences featuring actress Samantha Morton.

The project came together under unusual pressure, with the script written in three weeks to beat an impending writers strike. This led to the unprecedented decision to use two editing teams: King for documentary sequences and Sylvie Landra, known for her work with Luc Besson, handling dramatic portions. “I had two different creative brains for the two different films,” Kapadia notes. “The two editors were not on the film at the same time.”

The influence of their work can be seen in how audiences engage with their films in different contexts. “When I’m in the room, the film changes depending on who’s watching the film because different scenes have a different resonance to that audience,” Kapadia observes. In Spain, audiences focused on climate sequences that reflected floods in Valencia. In New York, political elements resonated more strongly.

With 2073, Kapadia explored how documentary techniques can engage with speculative scenarios while maintaining their commitment to archival authenticity. The film examines climate change, surveillance, and political power through a combination of footage and dramatic sequences that suggest new possibilities for documentary storytelling while remaining grounded in their established methods.

Asif Kapadia’s Unique Technique

2073’s technical challenges led to unexpected innovations. Working with LED screens, Chris King and Asif Kapadia discovered ways to integrate archival footage directly into dramatic scenes. “When you’re filming an actor in a very kind of futuristic way,” Kapadia explains, “you can have documentary footage playing in the background, so it becomes part of the scene itself.” This technique allowed them to blur the line between past and future in ways that served both the narrative and thematic elements of the film.

Their sound design process also evolved significantly. Having worked with composers like Antonio Pinto across multiple projects, Kapadia and King developed an approach where music could be written before footage was even edited. On 2073, they took this further, mixing electronic elements with orchestral scores to create a soundscape that bridges documentary and science fiction tones.

Kapadia and King’s handling of interviews has also grown more nuanced. Where once they might have relied on traditional sit-down conversations, they now employ a range of approaches. For 2073, they interviewed journalists from around the world, including Maria Ressa, Rana Ayyub, and Carole Cadwalladr. “Three women journalists who have decided their mission in a way is to hold their power and their leaders to account,” Kapadia explains. These interviews were then integrated into the film’s speculative framework in ways that blur the line between reporting and prophecy.

Their partnership also demonstrates the value of long-term creative relationships in filmmaking. Over multiple projects, they’ve developed a shorthand that allows them to work more efficiently while taking greater creative risks. King understands Kapadia’s visual instincts, while Kapadia trusts King’s sense of rhythm and pacing.

What Lies Ahead?

The future of Asif Kapadia and Chris King’s collaboration remains open-ended. With 2073, they’ve demonstrated that documentary techniques can be applied to speculative subjects without losing their grounding in reality. Their method of combining rigorous research with innovative presentation continues to yield new possibilities for nonfiction storytelling.

Through their years of working together, they’ve maintained a focus on practical problem-solving over theoretical approaches. When faced with technical challenges, they find concrete solutions rather than philosophical ones. This pragmatic attitude has allowed them to adapt their methods while maintaining consistency across projects.

Their work suggests new directions for documentary form while remaining grounded in traditional journalistic values. By combining archival footage with dramatic elements, they’ve found ways to address contemporary issues that might otherwise seem abstract or distant. The result is a body of work that engages with both past and future while remaining firmly rooted in present concerns.

The former film critic of the Guardian, who has died aged 91, was a friend to many of those whose work he admired — and criticised. Here, Stephen Frears, Asif Kapadia, Jeremy Thomas and Stephen Woolley pay tribute

He’d come up to you at solemn occasions with some wonderful, deflating phrase. With his wickedly impish face, he always looked as though he was up to mischief.

He wrote of My Beautiful Laundrette that it was “groundbreaking” and what he said changed my life and the lives of others. He was endlessly irreverent and yet absolutely committed to the best of cinema.

‘He let us all speak, then told us which film should win’
Asif Kapadia, director

Derek Malcolm was a legend of film criticism, his Guardian reviews played a huge part in my cinema education while I was a student. If Derek gave a French or Polish film a good review, I actively went out to see it, and the film was always amazing in some way or another. I trusted him and his taste.

Asif Kapadia in 2016. Photograph: Joel Ryan/Invision/AP

This was back in the day of print newspapers, when film reviewers were rare, influential — they could make a difference. His reviews coincided with me realising my taste was different to that of the friends I grew up with in Hackney. I had to go to the cinema on my own, so I could escape and lose myself in “cinema”.

Malcolm’s Film of the Week mattered, it was something I looked forward to. In my memory it was rarely a US film or studio film he highlighted. His reviews introduced me to so many incredible international directors and the greatest of world cinema.

Stephie Zacharek, Richard Corliss, Peter Cowie and Derek Malcolm at a panel in Venice, 2011. Photograph: Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage

I was lucky to meet and be interviewed by Derek after I made my first film The Warrior, which had been shot on location in India. Derek loved India, Indian cinema and actors, which I remember surprised me at the time.

I met Derek over the years at film festivals and screenings. He was always friendly, happy to chat, ready to offer a cutting remark about someone or something he had just seen (including my own work). I was lucky enough to sit on juries where Derek was the jury president. It was a great privilege to be in the room as he let us all speak, and then told us which film he thought should win. He was one of the best. They definitely don’t make people or critics like Derek Malcolm any more.

Now, out of respect, in homage, I’ll make sure my kids and I work our way through Derek’s Century of Films list together.

Jeremy Thomas at Cannes this year. Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Derek has been an important voice of thoughtful film criticism for most of my film-making career — respected throughout the world and beloved at film festivals from Cannes to Cuba. I even accepted a poor review sometimes.

I became firm friends with Derek and his wife, Sarah, in Bombay at the film festival. Derek loved cricket and horse racing nearly as much as he loved films. We talked long into the nights facing the Gateway to India. Many beers and Silk Cuts were consumed and I got to understand his passion for his favourite subjects.

I was so sorry to hear of Derek’s death. He was such a legendary Guardian icon for so long. And I’ve known him as long as I have been in the film business — from the early 1980s. If we hadn’t met for a long while, we always managed to pick up where we left off when we met again, be it Cannes, Venice, Berlin or Antalya, and it was usually to continue some appallingly filthy story of depravity acted out by the rank and feral of our industry, and inevitably my sides would be sore from laughing. Then we’d have a chat about Kurosawa.

I can confidently speak on behalf of the thousands of exhibitors, distributors and film-makers (and his film critic colleagues) of my generation to say how through his tenure we were constantly touched and revitalised by Derek’s warmth, intellect and unadulterated love of cinema, and his irascible sense of justice and humour.

He held great sway as the film critic of the Guardian at a time when the internet and social media fragmentation of critical consensus didn’t exist. You had to deduce from his erudite prose what he really thought.

At Palace Pictures we knew that the laconic Derek wasn’t swayed by younger film-makers or new trends. He was steelyeyed and he couldn’t be bought, but conversely he didn’t enjoy lambasting movies.

So while he occasionally balanced on the fence his feet were firmly on the ground when reviewing his beloved Satyajit Ray or Robert Bresson. We metaphorically hugged him to our hearts, and closely sought out his company — because he cherished cinema, but he also worried about how exhibitors and distributors might survive in a UK industry in the 70s, an era dominated by dwindling attendances and bingo mania.

Derek was a giant among critics and he wielded his undoubted power with the same delicacy and sense of justice that he admired in the great film-makers — and he never swayed from his responsibility to protect cinema as an art form.

Thank you, Derek. We will never forget your twinkling eyes and words of constant support, and affectionate but self-deprecating barbed humour. The films you shone your spotlight on gave us the inspiration, but without you the lights would have been very dim — as they are with your passing.