Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona completes the loose trilogy Asif Kapadia began with Senna (2010) and continued with the Oscar-winning Amy (2015): portraits of prodigies assembled entirely from archive, with interviews heard but never seen. It premiered out of competition at Cannes in May 2019, opened Sheffield Doc/Fest, and went on to BAFTA and British Independent Film Award nominations.

Kapadia and his regular editor Chris King worked from more than 500 hours of material, much of it never broadcast, much of it shot by cameras that followed him through the Naples years. The film concentrates on the Naples years: a working-class southern club, mocked by the wealthy north, buys the most gifted footballer in the world, and the city takes him to its heart. Kapadia draws a line between Diego, the shy boy from Villa Fiorito, and Maradona, the persona built to survive the pressure, and lets the footage argue between them. Antonio Pinto's score, familiar from the earlier films, gives the collage its pulse.

Critics received it as the most formally assured of the three films, and the Naples focus was widely praised for giving a sprawling life a shape. It is also a film about a city as much as a man, about what Naples asked of its idol and what the rest of Italy thought of both. For anyone sceptical of football documentaries, this is the place to start.