Asif Kapadia is set to return to his acclaimed music documentaries after a brief foray into other genres. Known for his archive-heavy films about global stars like Amy Winehouse, Diego Maradona, and Ayrton Senna, Kapadia has recently tackled non-music subjects like Disney+’s Camden and Apple TV+’s 1971: The Year That Changed Everything. However, in an interview with NME to promote his latest show, Prime Video’s Roger Federer: 12 Final Days, Kapadia hinted that he has a new music documentary in the pipeline. The project will reportedly have a lot of archive material, just like Amy. Kapadia refused to be drawn on the artist in question but described the new film as “a challenge, a good challenge, an interesting challenge, Because it’s a lot of material and it’s gonna take a while to put together.”
However, Kapadia’s next release will be a political film inspired by the current global situation before he returns to music. As for Roger Federer: 12 Final Days, which tells the story of the tennis star’s final days before retirement in 2022, the reviews have been mixed. While critic Mark Kermode praised it as “a very loving tribute,” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw criticised Kapadia’s seemingly unwillingness to go deeper, calling it an “officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand.”
Kapadia rejected the notion that Federer had any influence on the film, saying, “There was no interference [from Federer] in terms of me making the film.” Instead, he intended to make a “small observational doc about this very famous person,” with no deeper agenda. According to Kapadia, it is now more challenging to create deep-dive profiles of celebrities, leading to an increase in carefully controlled pop portraits, such as Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.
Although Kapadia will continue to work on profile documentaries, he relishes the challenge of pushing himself to evolve. “I still do what I do, and I’m working on some other stuff which is more similar to what I’ve done in the past. But I also like to challenge myself and do something different like with this new one.” That film, however, might not be out for a while since he noted that it will take a lot of time to assemble all the archive content
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